Philosophy and science

This Quine chap sounds like an interesting fellow.Asking as one who is pretty familiar with Popper but not with Quine can you give me an indication of where the key differences in aproach might lie?At this point I ask not to challenge but purely because you seem more knowledgeable of Quine and his approach than I.

I will look him up.I am familiar with Feyerabend and Kuhn to a limited extent (they were part of my philosophy of science course)Popper's anti-inductivist pure falsification arguments have, as I understand it, been logically refuted.

From memory......It was something like the basis of Popper's rejection of purely inductivist methods applied equally to his own proposed falsification alternative.Applied in the sense that it is purely inductive to think that if a theory has survived prior falsification attempts it will necessarily be better placed to survive future falsification attempts.Thus meaning that simply having survived a number of falsification attempts should make no difference to how confident one is in ones theory.Something like that anyway........If that makes no sense I will look it up. It was in my philosophy of sci class but that was going on 20 years (gulp!) ago now.

What is the difference between knowing, believing, imagining....etc?I think these questions are absolutely fundamental to what science is and impinge (in one way or another) on practically every topic that EvC forum was setup to cover. Yay!!!

I don't see the point of "detecting" unless it is related to "knowing" or "understanding".A camera can detect. A computer rigged up with a variety of sensors can detect all manner of things. But what is the point of merely "detecting" if the endgame isn't to "know" or "understand" something?Only a conscious mind of some sort can detect and "understand" or "know" something as a result of that detection.Surely that's where the requirement for philosophy comes in.

How do we go about determining what those criteria are (or should be)?And how can we ever know (or have confidence in) those criteria unless the knowledge on which our choice of criteria is based meets some criteria for knowledge itself?Where does this seeming infinite regress stop? Am I making even remote sense at this point? Well my thinking and interests are following similar lines albeit far in lag of your own.