Abstract

MANRIQUE BONILLA, Jesús Antonio. EPISTEMOLOGICAL STATUS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF UNIFORMITARIANISM IN GEOLOGY, FROM THE THEORY OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PHILOSOPHER KART R. POPPER. bol.geol. [online]. 2009, vol.31, n.1, pp.95-103. ISSN 0120-0283.

Since its inception, the geological uniformitarianism of Hutton and Lyell has been considered an epistemologically problematic and confusing inductive concept. Most of the criticism and attempts at clarification have proved contradictory and vague, because they also have been made from an inductive approach. Based on certain statements of its proponents, on the ideas of the philosopher K. R. Popper about the unsustainability of logical induction, and on three case studies, this paper attempts to show that the epistemological problems arise precisely from taking the uniformitarianism as inductive and trying to solve their problems from this approach. It then proposes a solution which releases the uniformity principle of any inductive features showing, according to Popper, that it is only a metaphysical conjecture, a working hypothesis, reducible to postulate the invariance of natural laws in time and space. From this view, its epistemological status and validity will be confused no more. In this sense, the correct treatment for epistemological uniformity will not be inductive but deductive.

Keywords : A priori; conjecture; deduction; empirical; epistemology; geology; induction; metaphysics; principle of uniformity of nature (PUN); uniformitarianism.

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