- "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 scientific knowledge and methods.
Epistemology: The study of knowledge and belief, including the nature of justification and the limits of knowledge.
Metaphysics: The study of fundamental questions about reality, including the nature of existence and causation.
Scientific Method: A systematic approach to scientific inquiry that involves observation, hypothesis testing, and experimentation.
Falsifiability: The criterion used to determine whether a scientific theory can be tested and potentially disproven.
Theory-Ladenness: The idea that scientific observations and experimental results can be influenced by prior beliefs and assumptions.
Realism vs. Anti-Realism: The debate over whether scientific theories aim to accurately represent objective reality or merely provide useful models for prediction and explanation.
Reductionism vs. Holism: The debate over whether complex phenomena can be fully explained in terms of their component parts or whether they require a more holistic approach.
Induction vs. Deduction: The debate over whether scientific knowledge is acquired through generalized principles derived from specific observations (induction) or through logical deduction from a set of premises (deduction).
Scientific Revolution: A period of dramatic change and progress in science, characterized by a shift in scientific paradigms and the rejection of established theories.
Philosophy of Biology: The study of the underlying concepts and assumptions of biological science, including the nature of life, evolution, and genetic determinism.
Philosophy of Physics: The study of the fundamental concepts and principles of physics, including the nature of space, time, and matter.
Philosophy of Chemistry: The study of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions of chemical science.
Philosophy of Mathematics: The study of the foundations, methods, and implications of mathematics.
Philosophy of Psychology: The study of the theories and methods of psychology, including the nature of consciousness, free will, and the mind-body problem.
Philosophy of Technology: The study of the impact of technology on society, culture, and individual human experience.
- "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."