Czynnik empiryczny w kosmologii Edwarda Artura Milne’a

This paper presents the role of the empirical factor in E.A. Milne’s hypothetico-deductivist cosmology. Two contexts of the constructing of his theory are analysed: the context of discovery and the context of justification. It is shown that in the first one empirical data (recession of the galaxies and Hubble’s law) inspired him to investigate the cosmological problem of the phenomenon of the expanding Universe and influenced him to put forward the hypotheses: uniform velocities of fundamental particles, Cosmological Principle, and Lorentz transformation. Milne emphasised that in the procedure of justification the completed theoretical cosmological models should be tested. The empirical factor plays the most significant role in this procedure because the empirical data are the ultimate basis for confirmation or falsification of the cosmological models.