A branch of philosophy, often approached through the history of science, which studies the nature of scientific theories, explanations, and descriptions, and relates them to general philosophical issues in epistemology, logic, or metaphysics. Organized empirical knowledge of the kind represented by successful science has often been taken as a model of human knowledge, against which other claimants can be measured; but its privileged status has been undermined by some recent theorists.
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, including the formal sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. In this respect, the philosophy of science is closely related to epistemology and the philosophy of language. Note that issues of scientific ethics are not usually considered to be part of the philosophy of science; they are studied in such fields as bioethics and science studies.
In particular, the philosophy of science considers the following topics:
The character and the development of concepts and terms, propositions and hypotheses, arguments and conclusions, as they function in science. The manner in which science explains natural phenomena and predicts natural occurrences. The implications of scientific methods and models, along with the technology that arises from scientific knowledge, for the larger society.Nature of scientific concepts and statements
Science draws conclusions about the way the world is and the way in which scientific theory relates to the world. Science draws upon evidence from experimentation, logical deduction, and rational thought in order to examine the world and the individuals that exist within society. In making observations of the nature of individuals and their surroundings, science seeks to explain the concepts that are entwined with everyday lives. Science in general is neither natural nor moral science. It's simply science. It's the application of a logical frame of reference to a set of objects or situations. In other words, science is a method that is hard to define but is not to be confused with the content or subject matter of any particular science.
Theory-dependence of observation
A scientific method depends on observation, in defining the subject under investigation and in performing experiments.
Observation involves perception as well as a cognitive process. (See the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for an early version of this understanding of the impact of cultural artifacts on our perceptions of the world.)
Empirical observation is supposedly used to determine the acceptability of some hypothesis within a theory.
Thomas Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the theory being tested from the influence of the theory in which the observations are grounded.
For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes.
That observation is embedded in theory does not mean that observations are irrelevant to science. Scientific understanding derives from observation, but the acceptance of scientific statements is dependent on the related theoretical background or paradigm as well as on observation. Coherentism and skepticism offer alternatives to foundationalism for dealing with the difficulty of grounding scientific theories in something more than observations.
Indeterminacy of theory under empirical testing
According to the Duhem–Quine thesis, after Pierre Duhem and W.V.
This thesis was accepted by Karl Popper, leading him to reject naïve falsification in favour of 'survival of the fittest', or most falsifiable, of scientific theories. In Popper's view, any hypothesis that does not make testable predictions is simply not science. Such a hypothesis may be useful or valuable, but it cannot be said to be science. However, that empirical evidence does not serve to determine between alternative theories does not necessarily imply that all theories are of equal value, as scientists often use guiding principles such as Occam's Razor.
One result of this is that specialists in the philosophy of science stress the requirement that observations made for the purposes of science be restricted to intersubjective objects. That is, science is restricted to those areas where there is general agreement on the nature of the observations involved.
Empiricism
A central concept in the philosophy of science is empiricism, or dependence on evidence. In this sense, scientific statements are subject to and derived from our experiences or observations. Scientific hypotheses are developed and tested through empirical methods consisting of observations and experiments. Once reproduced widely enough, the information resulting from our observations and experiments counts as the evidence upon which the scientific community develops theories that purport to explain facts about the world.
Observations involve perception, and so are themselves cognitive acts. Whenever the social context of the observer is a factor in an observation, objectivity is lost, and the observation is no longer useful in a scientific sense.
Scientists attempt to use induction, deduction and quasi-empirical methods, and invoke key conceptual metaphors to work observations into a coherent, self-consistent structure.
Scientific realism and instrumentalism
Scientific realism is the view that the universe really is as explained by scientific statements. In contrast to realism, instrumentalism holds that our perceptions, scientific ideas and theories do not necessarily reflect the real world accurately, but are useful instruments to explain, predict and control our experiences.
Constructivism
Constructivism is a view in philosophy according to which all knowledge is "constructed" inasmuch as it is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience.
Analysis and reductionism
Analysis is the activity of breaking an observation or theory down into simpler concepts in order to understand it. Analysis is as essential to science as it is to all rational enterprises.
Reductionism in science can have several different senses.
Daniel Dennett invented the term greedy reductionism to describe the assumption that such reductionism was possible. He also says that:
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. —Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995.Arguments made against greedy reductionism through reference to emergent phenomena rely upon the fact that self-referential systems can be said to contain more information than can be described through individual analysis of their component parts.
Grounds of validity of scientific reasoning
The most powerful statements in science are those with the widest applicability.
But it is not possible for scientists to have tested every incidence of an action, and found a reaction.
Induction
One solution to this problem is to rely on the notion of induction.
Explaining why induction commonly works has been somewhat problematic.
One answer has been to conceive of a different form of rational argument, one that does not rely on deduction.
The problem of induction is one of considerable debate and importance in the philosophy of science: is induction indeed justified, and if so, how?
Falsifiability
Another way to distinguish science from pseudoscience (e.g. This principle states that in order to be useful (or even scientific at all), a scientific statement ('fact', theory, 'law', principle, etc) must be falsifiable, that is, able to be tested and proven wrong.
Popper described falsifiability using the following observations, paraphrased from a 1963 essay on "Conjectures and Refutations":
It is easy to confirm or verify nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations. that is, if, unenlightened by the theory, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory. "Good" scientific theories include prohibitions which forbid certain things to happen. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their advocates — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.These observations are part of Popper's case for defending the idea that what makes a theory scientific is its falsifiability, or refutability.
Coherentism
Induction and falsification both attempt to justify scientific statements by reference to other specific scientific statements.
The way in which basic statements are derived from observation complicates the problem.
Coherentism offers an alternative by claiming that statements can be justified by their being a part of a coherent system. In the case of science, the system is usually taken to be the complete set of beliefs of an individual or of the community of scientists. Quine argued for a Coherentist approach to science.
Ockham's razor
William Ockham (c.
The practice of scientific inquiry typically involves a number of heuristic principles that serve as rules of thumb for guiding the work. As interpreted in contemporary scientific practice, it advises opting for the simplest theory among a set of competing theories that have a comparable explanatory power, discarding assumptions that do not improve the explanation.
Among the many difficulties that arise in trying to apply Ockham's razor is the problem of formalizing and quantifying the "measure of simplicity" that is implied by the task of deciding which of several theories is the simplest.
Social accountability
Scientific Openness
A very broad issue affecting the neutrality of science, concerns the areas over which science chooses to explore, what part of the world and man, is studied by science.
Since the areas for science to investigate are possible infinite, the issue then arises as to what should science attempt to question or find out.
Philip Kitcher in his "Science, Truth, and Democracy" argues that scientific studies that attempt to show one segment of the population as being less intelligent, successful or emotionally backward compared to others, has a political feedback effect which further excludes such groups from access to science. Thus such studies undermine the broad consensus required for good science by excluding certain people, and so proving itself in the end to be unscientific.
See also The Mismeasure of Man, nazi science.
Scientific infallibility
A critical question in science is, to what degree the current body of scientific knowledge can be taken as an indicator of what is actually 'true' about the physical world in which we live?
However, it is common for members of the public to have the opposite view of science — many lay people believe that scientists are making claims of infallibility. Science serves in the process of consensus decision making by which people of varying moral and ethical views come to agree on 'what is real'. In secular and technological societies, without any stronger conception of reality based on other shared ethical or moral or religious grounds, science has come to serve as the primary arbiter in disputes.
Concern about the wide disparity between how scientists work and how their work is perceived has led to public campaigns to educate lay people about scientific skepticism and the scientific method.
Critiques of scientific method
Paul Feyerabend argued that no description of scientific method could possibly be broad enough to encompass all the approaches and methods used by scientists. Feyerabend objected to prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would stifle and cramp scientific progress.
Sociology and anthropology of science
In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn argues that the process of observation and evaluation take place within a paradigm. 'A paradigm is what the members of a community of scientists share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm' (postscript, part 1). On this account, science can be done only as a part of a community, and is inherently a communal activity.
For Kuhn the fundamental difference between science and other disciplines is in the way in which the communities function. Others, especially Feyerabend and some post-modernist thinkers, have argued that there is insufficient difference between social practices in science and other disciplines to maintain this distinction. It is apparent that social factors play an important and direct role in scientific method, but that they do not serve to differentiate science from other disciplines. Furthermore, although on this account science is socially constructed, it does not follow that reality is a social construct. (See Science studies and the links there.) Kuhn’s ideas are equally applicable to both realist and anti-realist ontologies.
(There are, however, those who maintain that scientific reality is indeed a social construct. See for example the Sokal Affair entry.)
A major development in recent decades has been the study of the formation, structure, and evolution of scientific communities by sociologists and anthropologists including Michel Callon, Elihu Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss, Lucy Suchman, and others. Here the approach to the philosophy of science is to study how scientific communities actually operate.
More recently Gibbons and colleagues (1994) have introduced the notion of mode 2 knowledge production.
Researchers in Information science have also made contributions, e.g., the Scientific Community Metaphor.
Continental philosophy of science
In the Continental philosophical tradition, science is viewed from a world-historical perspective. Philosophers such as Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem and Gaston Bachelard also wrote their works with this world-historical approach to science. Nietzsche advanced the thesis in his "The Genealogy of Morals" that science was a new form of religion.
All of these approaches involve a historical and sociological turn to science, with a special emphasis on lived experience (a kind of Husserlian "life-world"), rather than a progress-based or anti-historical approach as done in the analytic tradition. Two other approaches to science include Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Martin Heidegger's hermeneutics.
The largest effect on the continental tradition with respect to science was Martin Heidegger's assault on the theoretical attidude in general which of course includes the scientific attitude. For this reason one could suggest that the philosophy of science, in the Continental tradition, has not developed much further due to its inability to overcome Heidegger's criticism.
Notwithstanding, there have been a number of important works: especially a Kuhnian precursor, Alexandre Koyré. Another important development was that of Foucault's analysis of the historical and scientific thought in The Order of Things and his study of power and corruption within the "science" of madness. His works were considered a great work of art and the science of madness was a significant achievement. In involved explaining madness as a science (knowledge) and therefore must be gratified.
Traditional Chinese philosophy of science
In ancient China, science and technology were subordinate to value. Therefore, its philosophy of science and values like moral and pragmatic considerations was a single entity.
Philosophy of science by scientists
Many scientists who were not trained as philosophers have commented extensively on the philosophy of science as it relates to their particular discipline. Albert Einstein, for example, wrote a number of popular works that included speculations on the nature of science, its relationship to theology, and so on.
More recently, the battles over teaching evolution and intelligent design in the public schools have brought certain philosophical issues to the fore (most notably, "What makes an area of study scientific?"), and practicing biological and geological scientists have found themselves being asked, along with philosophers, to comment on matters that are at least as much philosophy as biology.
Major contributors to the philosophy of science
| Sir Francis Bacon Roger Bacon Roy Bhaskar Niels Bohr Michel Callon Rudolph Carnap Auguste Comte René Descartes Pierre Duhem Albert Einstein Empedocles Paul Feyerabend Richard Feynman Galileo Galilei Robert Grosseteste | Edmund Husserl Immanuel Kant Jaegwon Kim Thomas Kuhn Imre Lakatos Bruno Latour Ernst Mach Isaac Newton Charles Peirce Henri Poincaré Michael Polanyi Sir Karl Popper Bertrand Russell David Stove William Whewell Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Philosophy of the special sciences
Philosophy of biology Philosophy of chemistry Philosophy of physicsPhilosophy of science topics
| Causality Curve fitting Demarcation problem Dualism Faith and rationality Free will and determinism | Philosophy of mathematics Philosophy of space and time Problem of the criterion Simplicity Uniformity Unobservables Rhetoric of science |
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