Five Objectives of Pepper’s World Hypothesis

The five objectives that Stephen C. Pepper tries to achieve in his book World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence: 

1. He rejects skepticism and dogmatism by showing that both are weak arguments which lead to the same positions. 

2. He presents a view of evidence as uncriticized, and criticized or refined—with commonsense being the uncriticized evidence. He tries to establish that knowledge is gathered through the progressive refinement of commonsense knowledge.

3. He tries to explain the different types of corroboration through which refined evidence is created—he develops terms like “dubitanda” (commonsense); “data” (multiplicative jargon); “danda” (logical data). 

4. He suggests the origin of the world hypothesis through the root metaphor theory. 

5. He does an analysis of the six world hypotheses which, he holds, drive philosophical thought: “Mysticism” and “Animism” are the inadequate hypotheses; “Formism,” “Mechanism,” “Contextualism,” and “Organicism” are the adequate hypotheses.