Donald A. Gillies (; born 1944) is a British philosopher and historian of

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

and

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

Career

After undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, Gillies became a graduate student of

Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...

and

Imre Lakatos Imre Lakatos (, ; hu, Lakatos Imre ; 9 November 1922 – 2 February 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pr ...

(his official PhD supervisor) at the

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 millio ...

, where he completed a PhD on the foundations of probability.Wenceslao J. González
Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy and Methodology of Science.
Netbiblo, 2006, ; pp. v-vi Gilles is a past President and a current Vice-President of

British Society for the Philosophy of Science The British Society for the Philosophy of Science (BSPS) is a philosophy, philosophical learned society, society based in the United Kingdom that aims to further the philosophy of science, and which manages the ''British Journal for the Philosophy o ...

. From 1982 to 1985 he was an editor of the ''British Journal for the Philosophy of Science''. Gillies is probably best known for his work on Bayesian confirmation theory, his attempt to simplify and extend Popper’s theory of corroboration. He proposes a novel "principle of explanatory surplus", likening a successful theoretician to a successful entrepreneur. The entrepreneur generates a surplus (of income) over and above his initial investment (the outgoes) to meet the necessary expenses of the enterprise. Similarly, the theoretician generates a surplus (of explanations) over and above his initial investment (of assumptions) to make the necessary explanations of known facts. The size of this surplus is held to be a measure of the confirmation of the theory, but only in qualitative, rather than quantitative, terms. Gillies has researched the philosophy of science, most particularly the foundations of probability; the philosophy of logic and mathematics; and the interactions of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

with some aspects of philosophy, including probability, logic, causality and scientific method. In the philosophy of mathematics, he has developed a method of dealing with very large transfinite cardinals from an Aristotelian point of view.

Books and articles (selection)

*Gillies, Donald and Chihara, Charles S. (1988).
An Interchange on the Popper-Miller Argument
. ''Philosophical Studies'', Volume 54, pp. 1–8. *Gillies, Donald (1989). "Non-Bayesian Confirmation Theory and the Principle of Explanatory Surplus". ''The Philosophy of Science Association'', PSA 1988, Volume 2, pp. 373–380. *Gillies, Donald ed. (1992). ''

Revolutions in Mathematics {{italic title ''Revolutions in Mathematics'' is a 1992 collection of essays in the history and philosophy of mathematics. Contents *Michael J. Crowe, Ten "laws" concerning patterns of change in the history of mathematics (1975) (15–20); *Herbe ...

''. Oxford Science Publications. The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, New York. *Gillies, Donald (1996). "Artificial intelligence and scientific method". Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Gillies, Donald (2000). ''Philosophical Theories of Probability''. London: Routledge. *Gillies, Donald (2010). ''An objective Theory of Probability''. London: Routledge. *Gillies, Donald (2011). ''Frege, Dedekind, and Peano on the Foundations of Arithmetic''. London: Routledge.

References

External links

Donald Gillies's personal webpage

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gillies, Donald A. Philosophers of mathematics Philosophers of science British historians of mathematics 20th-century English mathematicians 21st-century English mathematicians Academics of University College London Living people 20th-century British philosophers 21st-century British philosophers 1944 births