Richard Bevan Braithwaite, an English philosopher, was educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied physics and mathematics before turning to philosophy. Braithwaite was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University. He served as the president of the Mind Association (1946) and of the Aristotelian Society (1946–1947). In the philosophy of science he made significant contributions on the nature of scientific theories and explanation, theoretical terms, models, foundations of probability and statistics, the justification of induction, and teleological explanations. He also wrote on subjects in moral and religious philosophy.

Scientific Theories

Braithwaite defended the view that a scientific theory consists of a set of initial hypotheses, with empirically testable generalizations that follow deductively. To explain a generalization is to show that it is implied by higher level generalizations in the theory. Often, especially in the physical sciences, the initial postulates will contain so-called...