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This chapter reviewed a few fundamental philosophical principles that are involved in scientific thinking. We considered the relationship between philosophy and science, and we discussed several philosophical concepts, including fallibi- lism, objectivity, reductionism, and affirming the consequent. We touched on the difficult question of the relationships among explanation, uncertainty, and levels of organization of nature that runs through the book. And we explored two major forms of reasoning—deduction and induction—and showed that, while they are inadequate in themselves to account for the growth of scientific knowledge, they have roles in science that we will begin to explore in the next chapter, where we take up the central topic: the modern scientific hypothesis.