conjecturalism

English

Etymology

conjectural +‎ -ism

Noun

conjecturalism (uncountable)

1. (philosophy) The belief that intentionally supposing that a proposition is true is a good reason to believe that proposition in the absence of evidence of its falsehood.
   • 1985, Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, page 142:

     If conjecturalism in a suitably strengthened form is to succeed where its original Popperian version fails, one major aim of the book under review is, as one might put it, to defeat rationality-scepticism.

   • Quoted in 2007, Peter N. Miller, Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (page 339)

     Extreme conjecturalism is inevitably accompanied by Pyrrhonism. Against conjecturalism and Pyrrhonism there is only the old remedy: the cautious and methodical examination of documents with all the skills that were developed in the collaboration of antiquaries and textual critics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

   • 2013, Sergio L. de C. Fernandes, Foundations of Objective Knowledge:

     It is in the light of Kant's conjecturalism, for example, that we should interpret the famous passage of the first Critique, at B XIII: the intellectual revolution by which the experimental method of modern science emerged is there interpreted by Kant as amounting to the realisation that "reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own". This means that, regarding nature as the object of scientific knowledge, that which reason puts into nature, that is, our conjectures, serve^[sic] as reason's own guide: in order that we can further our knowledge of nature, we must constrain, or compel it to answer questions we ourselves formulate.