- "The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science."
The study of the underlying principles and assumptions of scientific inquiry.
Scientific Methodology: This includes the principles of scientific inquiry, such as hypothesis testing, observation, experimentation, and reproducibility.
Induction and Deduction: These are two main ways of reasoning in science, and understanding their differences and limitations is crucial to doing science effectively.
Skepticism and Falsifiability: These concepts are crucial to scientific inquiry, as science requires that claims be testable and open to criticism.
Empiricism: The idea that knowledge comes from experience, and therefore that all scientific claims should be based on evidence from the natural world.
Scientific Realism vs. Anti-Realism: The debate over whether scientific theories and laws map onto the real world or are simply useful fictions.
Scientific Revolution: This period in history (roughly 1500-1700) saw significant changes to scientific thought stemming from the rise of experimental science and the flourishing of new disciplines like astronomy and anatomy.
Paradigms and Scientific Revolutions: The idea that scientific fields progress via shifts in dominant paradigms, as exemplified by the work of Kuhn.
Reductionism: The idea that complex systems can be understood by breaking them down into simpler parts, an approach often employed in science.
Causality: The idea that events or objects (such as a disease or a chemical reaction) have a cause-and-effect relationship, and that understanding such relationships is critical to science.
Science and Ethics: Questions of scientific responsibility arise in areas such as medical research and environmental science, and the ethical implications of scientific progress are worth exploring.
Social and Cultural Contexts of Science: Understanding the social and cultural contexts in which science is conducted can help shed light on why certain scientific ideas were (or were not) accepted at particular times.
The Philosophy of Experimentation: Numerous philosophical questions arise when considering the nature and design of scientific experiments, such as the question of whether experimentation always requires the manipulation of variables.
The Philosophy of Statistics: Statistics play a crucial role in many scientific fields, and understanding the nature and limits of statistical inference is important for conducting and evaluating scientific research.
Scientific Explanation and Understanding: The nature of scientific explanations and the criteria for determining whether an explanation is satisfactory are hotly contested topics in the philosophy of science.
The Role of Imagination and Creativity in Science: Science may be rigorously empirical, but it is also creative and imaginative, and prominent thinkers in the philosophy of science have considered the role of imagination in scientific progress.
Positivism: Positivism is a philosophical movement that originated in France in the mid-19th century. It stresses the importance of empirical evidence and scientific methods in understanding the world. Positivists believe that only scientific statements are meaningful and that everything else is merely subjective or speculative.
Critical Realism: Critical Realism is a philosophy of science that emphasizes the importance of understanding the social context and historical development of scientific knowledge. This approach emphasizes that scientific knowledge is not simply an objective reflection of reality, but rather a product of social and historical processes.
Falsificationism: Falsificationism is a theory of scientific knowledge that emphasizes the importance of falsifiability. This approach contends that a theory or scientific hypothesis cannot be considered scientific unless it is testable and can be potentially falsified by empirical evidence.
Constructivism: Constructivism is a philosophy of science that emphasizes the importance of subjective and social aspects in the construction of scientific knowledge. This approach contends that scientific knowledge is necessarily constructed by individuals and communities through social processes.
Structuralism: Structuralism is a philosophy of science that emphasizes the importance of analyzing the underlying structures that govern scientific knowledge. This approach contends that scientific knowledge is not merely a collection of facts but rather a set of interconnected systems that can be analyzed using structural analysis.
Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is a philosophy of science that focuses on interpretation and understanding. This approach contends that scientific knowledge is constructed through the interpretation of empirical data and other relevant information.
Critical Theory: Critical Theory is a philosophy of science that emphasizes the importance of understanding the social, economic, and political factors that influence scientific knowledge. This approach contends that scientific knowledge is not simply a reflection of reality but rather a product of social and historical processes that are shaped by power relations and other social factors.
Phenomenology: Phenomenology is a philosophy of science that focuses on the subjective experience of the individual. This approach stresses the importance of understanding the subjective meaning of scientific knowledge and the role that subjective experience plays in shaping scientific knowledge.
- "This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth."
- "Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of science."
- "Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science."
- "There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science."
- "philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences (such as biology or physics)."
- "Karl Popper criticized logical positivism and helped establish a modern set of standards for scientific methodology."
- "Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as the steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation."
- "The coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became prominent due to W. V. Quine and others."
- "A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend in particular, argue that there is no such thing as the 'scientific method', so all approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones."
- "Another approach to thinking about science involves studying how knowledge is created from a sociological perspective."
- "Finally, a tradition in continental philosophy approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human experience."
- "A central theme is whether the terms of one scientific theory can be intra- or intertheoretically reduced to the terms of another."
- "The question of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy of medicine."
- "The question of the validity of scientific reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics."
- "Additionally, the philosophies of biology, psychology, and the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity."
- "the philosophies of biology, psychology, and the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can...inevitably shaped by values and by social relations."
- "the implications of economics for public policy."
- "That is, can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology?"
- "the ultimate purpose of science."