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Philosophy of science is a sub-field of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and
implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science,
the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline
overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship
between science and truth. There is no consensus among philosophers about
many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether
science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can
be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole,
philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences (such as
biology or physics). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science
to reach conclusions about philosophy itself. While philosophical thought pertaining to
science dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, philosophy of science emerged as
a distinct discipline only in the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivism movement,
which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements' meaningfulness
and objectively assessing them. Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
was also formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as steady, cumulative
acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead
arguing that any progress is relative to a "paradigm," the set of questions, concepts,
and practices that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period. Karl Popper
and Charles Sanders Peirce moved on from positivism to establish a modern set of standards for
scientific methodology. Subsequently, 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. Some thinkers such
as Stephen Jay Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity
of nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) 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, an approach
represented by scholars like David Bloor and Barry Barnes. Finally, a tradition in continental
philosophy approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human experience.
Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the nature of time raised
by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of economics for public policy. A central
theme is whether one scientific discipline can be reduced to the terms of another. That
is, can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology?
The general questions of philosophy of science also arise with greater specificity in some
particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific reasoning is
seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics. The question of what counts
as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy
of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, of psychology, and of the social
sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or
are inevitably shaped by values and by social relations.
== Introduction ==
=== Defining science ===
Distinguishing between science and non-science is referred to as the demarcation problem.
For example, should psychoanalysis be considered science? How about so-called creation science,
the inflationary multiverse hypothesis, or macroeconomics? Karl Popper called this the
central question in the philosophy of science. However, no unified account of the problem
has won acceptance among philosophers, and some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting.
Martin Gardner has argued for the use of a Potter Stewart standard ("I know it when I
see it") for recognizing pseudoscience.Early attempts by the logical positivists grounded
science in observation while non-science was non-observational and hence meaningless. Popper
argued that the central property of science is falsifiability. That is, every genuinely
scientific claim is capable of being proven false, at least in principle.An area of study
or speculation that masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy that it
would not otherwise be able to achieve is referred to as pseudoscience, fringe science,
or junk science. Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term "cargo cult science" for cases
in which researchers believe they are doing science because their activities have the
outward appearance of it but actually lack the "kind of utter honesty" that allows their
results to be rigorously evaluated.
=== Scientific explanation ===
A closely related question is what counts as a good scientific explanation. In addition
to providing predictions about future events, society often takes scientific theories to
provide explanations for events that occur regularly or have already occurred. Philosophers
have investigated the criteria by which a scientific theory can be said to have successfully
explained a phenomenon, as well as what it means to say a scientific theory has explanatory
power. One early and influential theory of scientific
explanation is the deductive-nomological model. It says that a successful scientific explanation
must deduce the occurrence of the phenomena in question from a scientific law. This view
has been subjected to substantial criticism, resulting in several widely acknowledged counterexamples
to the theory. It is especially challenging to characterize what is meant by an explanation
when the thing to be explained cannot be deduced from any law because it is a matter of chance,
or otherwise cannot be perfectly predicted from what is known. Wesley Salmon developed
a model in which a good scientific explanation must be statistically relevant to the outcome
to be explained. Others have argued that the key to a good explanation is unifying disparate
phenomena or providing a causal mechanism.
=== Justifying science ===
Although it is often taken for granted, it is not at all clear how one can infer the
validity of a general statement from a number of specific instances or infer the truth of
a theory from a series of successful tests. For example, a chicken observes that each
morning the farmer comes and gives it food, for hundreds of days in a row. The chicken
may therefore use inductive reasoning to infer that the farmer will bring food every morning.
However, one morning, the farmer comes and kills the chicken. How is scientific reasoning
more trustworthy than the chicken's reasoning? One approach is to acknowledge that induction
cannot achieve certainty, but observing more instances of a general statement can at least
make the general statement more probable. So the chicken would be right to conclude
from all those mornings that it is likely the farmer will come with food again the next
morning, even if it cannot be certain. However, there remain difficult questions about the
process of interpreting any given evidence into a probability that the general statement
is true. One way out of these particular difficulties is to declare that all beliefs about scientific
theories are subjective, or personal, and correct reasoning is merely about how evidence
should change one's subjective beliefs over time.Some argue that what scientists do is
not inductive reasoning at all but rather abductive reasoning, or inference to the best
explanation. In this account, science is not about generalizing specific instances but
rather about hypothesizing explanations for what is observed. As discussed in the previous
section, it is not always clear what is meant by the "best explanation." Ockham's razor,
which counsels choosing the simplest available explanation, thus plays an important role
in some versions of this approach. To return to the example of the chicken, would it be
simpler to suppose that the farmer cares about it and will continue taking care of it indefinitely
or that the farmer is fattening it up for slaughter? Philosophers have tried to make
this heuristic principle more precise in terms of theoretical parsimony or other measures.
Yet, although various measures of simplicity have been brought forward as potential candidates,
it is generally accepted that there is no such thing as a theory-independent measure
of simplicity. In other words, there appear to be as many different measures of simplicity
as there are theories themselves, and the task of choosing between measures of simplicity
appears to be every bit as problematic as the job of choosing between theories. Nicholas
Maxwell has argued for some decades that unity rather than simplicity is the key non-empirical
factor in influencing choice of theory in science, persistent preference for unified
theories in effect committing science to the acceptance of a metaphysical thesis concerning
unity in nature. In order to improve this problematic thesis, it needs to be represented
in the form of a hierarchy of theses, each thesis becoming more insubstantial as one
goes up the hierarchy.
=== Observation inseparable from theory ===
When making observations, scientists look through telescopes, study images on electronic
screens, record meter readings, and so on. Generally, on a basic level, they can agree
on what they see, e.g., the thermometer shows 37.9 degrees C. But, if these scientists have
different ideas about the theories that have been developed to explain these basic observations,
they may disagree about what they are observing. For example, before Albert Einstein's general
theory of relativity, observers would have likely interpreted the image at right as five
different objects in space. In light of that theory, however, astronomers will tell you
that there are actually only two objects, one in the center and four different images
of a second object around the sides. Alternatively, if other scientists suspect that something
is wrong with the telescope and only one object is actually being observed, they are operating
under yet another theory. Observations that cannot be separated from theoretical interpretation
are said to be theory-laden.All observation involves both perception and cognition. That
is, one does not make an observation passively, but rather is actively engaged in distinguishing
the phenomenon being observed from surrounding sensory data. Therefore, observations are
affected by one's underlying understanding of the way in which the world functions, and
that understanding may influence what is perceived, noticed, or deemed worthy of consideration.
In this sense, it can be argued that all observation is theory-laden.
=== The purpose of science ===
Should science aim to determine ultimate truth, or are there questions that science cannot
answer? Scientific realists claim that science aims at truth and that one ought to regard
scientific theories as true, approximately true, or likely true. Conversely, scientific
anti-realists argue that science does not aim (or at least does not succeed) at truth,
especially truth about unobservables like electrons or other universes. Instrumentalists
argue that scientific theories should only be evaluated on whether they are useful. In
their view, whether theories are true or not is beside the point, because the purpose of
science is to make predictions and enable effective technology.
Realists often point to the success of recent scientific theories as evidence for the truth
(or near truth) of current theories. Antirealists point to either the many false theories in
the history of science, epistemic morals, the success of false modeling assumptions,
or widely termed postmodern criticisms of objectivity as evidence against scientific
realism. Antirealists attempt to explain the success of scientific theories without reference
to truth. Some antirealists claim that scientific theories aim at being accurate only about
observable objects and argue that their success is primarily judged by that criterion.
=== Values and science === Values intersect with science in different
ways. There are epistemic values that mainly guide the scientific research. The scientific
enterprise is embedded in particular culture and values through individual practitioners.
Values emerge from science, both as product and process and can be distributed among several
cultures in the society. If it is unclear what counts as science, how
the process of confirming theories works, and what the purpose of science is, there
is considerable scope for values and other social influences to shape science. Indeed,
values can play a role ranging from determining which research gets funded to influencing
which theories achieve scientific consensus. For example, in the 19th century, cultural
values held by scientists about race shaped research on evolution, and values concerning
social class influenced debates on phrenology (considered scientific at the time). Feminist
philosophers of science, sociologists of science, and others explore how social values affect
science.
== History ==
=== Pre-modern ===
The origins of philosophy of science trace back to Plato and Aristotle who distinguished
the forms of approximate and exact reasoning, set out the threefold scheme of abductive,
deductive, and inductive inference, and also analyzed reasoning by analogy. The eleventh
century Arab polymath Ibn al-Haytham (known in Latin as Alhazen) conducted his research
in optics by way of controlled experimental testing and applied geometry, especially in
his investigations into the images resulting from the reflection and refraction of light.
Roger Bacon (1214–1294), an English thinker and experimenter heavily influenced by al-Haytham,
is recognized by many to be the father of modern scientific method. His view that mathematics
was essential to a correct understanding of natural philosophy was considered to be 400
years ahead of its time.
=== Modern ===
Francis Bacon (no direct relation to Roger, who lived 300 years earlier) was a seminal
figure in philosophy of science at the time of the Scientific Revolution. In his work
Novum Organum (1620) – an allusion to Aristotle's Organon – Bacon outlined a new system of
logic to improve upon the old philosophical process of syllogism. Bacon's method relied
on experimental histories to eliminate alternative theories. In 1637, René Descartes established
a new framework for grounding scientific knowledge in his treatise, Discourse on Method, advocating
the central role of reason as opposed to sensory experience. By contrast, in 1713, the 2nd
edition of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica argued that "... hypotheses
... have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy[,] propositions are deduced
from the phenomena and rendered general by induction. " This passage influenced a "later
generation of philosophically-inclined readers to pronounce a ban on causal hypotheses in
natural philosophy." In particular, later in the 18th century, David Hume would famously
articulate skepticism about the ability of science to determine causality and gave a
definitive formulation of the problem of induction. The 19th century writings of John Stuart Mill
are also considered important in the formation of current conceptions of the scientific method,
as well as anticipating later accounts of scientific explanation.
=== Logical positivism ===
Instrumentalism became popular among physicists around the turn of the 20th century, after
which logical positivism defined the field for several decades. Logical positivism accepts
only testable statements as meaningful, rejects metaphysical interpretations, and embraces
verificationism (a set of theories of knowledge that combines logicism, empiricism, and linguistics
to ground philosophy on a basis consistent with examples from the empirical sciences).
Seeking to overhaul all of philosophy and convert it to a new scientific philosophy,
the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle propounded logical positivism in the late 1920s.
Interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language, logical positivists identified
a verifiability principle or criterion of cognitive meaningfulness. From Bertrand Russell's
logicism they sought reduction of mathematics to logic. They also embraced Russell's logical
atomism, Ernst Mach's phenomenalism—whereby the mind knows only actual or potential sensory
experience, which is the content of all sciences, whether physics or psychology—and Percy
Bridgman's operationalism. Thereby, only the verifiable was scientific and cognitively
meaningful, whereas the unverifiable was unscientific, cognitively meaningless "pseudostatements"—metaphysical,
emotive, or such—not worthy of further review by philosophers, who were newly tasked to
organize knowledge rather than develop new knowledge.
Logical positivism is commonly portrayed as taking the extreme position that scientific
language should never refer to anything unobservable—even the seemingly core notions of causality, mechanism,
and principles—but that is an exaggeration. Talk of such unobservables could be allowed
as metaphorical—direct observations viewed in the abstract—or at worst metaphysical
or emotional. Theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws, while theoretical terms
would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules. Mathematics in physics
would reduce to symbolic logic via logicism, while rational reconstruction would convert
ordinary language into standardized equivalents, all networked and united by a logical syntax.
A scientific theory would be stated with its method of verification, whereby a logical
calculus or empirical operation could verify its falsity or truth.
In the late 1930s, logical positivists fled Germany and Austria for Britain and America.
By then, many had replaced Mach's phenomenalism with Otto Neurath's physicalism, and Rudolf
Carnap had sought to replace verification with simply confirmation. With World War II's
close in 1945, logical positivism became milder, logical empiricism, led largely by Carl Hempel,
in America, who expounded the covering law model of scientific explanation as a way of
identifying the logical form of explanations without any reference to the suspect notion
of "causation". The logical positivist movement became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy,
and dominated Anglosphere philosophy, including philosophy of science, while influencing sciences,
into the 1960s. Yet the movement failed to resolve its central problems, and its doctrines
were increasingly assaulted. Nevertheless, it brought about the establishment of philosophy
of science as a distinct subdiscipline of philosophy, with Carl Hempel playing a key
role.
=== Thomas Kuhn ===
In the 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the process
of observation and evaluation takes place within a paradigm, a logically consistent
"portrait" of the world that is consistent with observations made from its framing. A
paradigm also encompasses the set of questions and practices that define a scientific discipline.
He characterized normal science as the process of observation and "puzzle solving" which
takes place within a paradigm, whereas revolutionary science occurs when one paradigm overtakes
another in a paradigm shift.Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the hypothesis
being tested from the influence of the theory in which the observations are grounded, and
he argued that it is not possible to evaluate competing paradigms independently. More than
one logically consistent construct can paint a usable likeness of the world, but there
is no common ground from which to pit two against each other, theory against theory.
Each paradigm has its own distinct questions, aims, and interpretations. Neither provides
a standard by which the other can be judged, so there is no clear way to measure scientific
progress across paradigms. For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained
by rational processes, but not ultimately determined by them. The choice between paradigms
involves setting two or more "portraits" against the world and deciding which likeness is most
promising. For Kuhn, acceptance or rejection of a paradigm is a social process as much
as a logical process. Kuhn's position, however, is not one of relativism. According to Kuhn,
a paradigm shift occurs when a significant number of observational anomalies arise in
the old paradigm and a new paradigm makes sense of them. That is, the choice of a new
paradigm is based on observations, even though those observations are made against the background
of the old paradigm.
== Current approaches ==
=== Naturalism's axiomatic assumptions ===
All scientific study inescapably builds on at least some essential assumptions that are
untested by scientific processes. Kuhn concurs that all science is based on an approved agenda
of unprovable assumptions about the character of the universe, rather than merely on empirical
facts. These assumptions—a paradigm—comprise a collection of beliefs, values and techniques
that are held by a given scientific community, which legitimize their systems and set the
limitations to their investigation. For naturalists, nature is the only reality, the only paradigm.
There is no such thing as 'supernatural'. The scientific method is to be used to investigate
all reality.Naturalism is the implicit philosophy of working scientists. The following basic
assumptions are needed to justify the scientific method.
that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers. "The basis for
rationality is acceptance of an external objective reality." "Objective reality is clearly an
essential thing if we are to develop a meaningful perspective of the world. Nevertheless its
very existence is assumed." "Our belief that objective reality exist is an assumption that
it arises from a real world outside of ourselves. As infants we made this assumption unconsciously.
People are happy to make this assumption that adds meaning to our sensations and feelings,
than live with solipsism." Without this assumption, there would be only the thoughts and images
in our own mind (which would be the only existing mind) and there would be no need of science,
or anything else." that this objective reality is governed by
natural laws; "Science, at least today, assumes that the universe obeys to knoweable principles
that don't depend on time or place, nor on subjective parameters such as what we think,
know or how we behave." Hugh Gauch argues that science presupposes that "the physical
world is orderly and comprehensible." that reality can be discovered by means of
systematic observation and experimentation. Stanley Sobottka said, "The assumption of
external reality is necessary for science to function and to flourish. For the most
part, science is the discovering and explaining of the external world." "Science attempts
to produce knowledge that is as universal and objective as possible within the realm
of human understanding." that Nature has uniformity of laws and most
if not all things in nature must have at least a natural cause. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould
referred to these two closely related propositions as the constancy of nature's laws and the
operation of known processes. Simpson agrees that the axiom of uniformity of law, an unprovable
postulate, is necessary in order for scientists to extrapolate inductive inference into the
unobservable past in order to meaningfully study it.
that experimental procedures will be done satisfactorily without any deliberate or unintentional
mistakes that will influence the results. that experimenters won't be significantly
biased by their presumptions. that random sampling is representative of
the entire population. A simple random sample (SRS) is the most basic probabilistic option
used for creating a sample from a population. The benefit of SRS is that the investigator
is guaranteed to choose a sample that represents the population that ensures statistically
valid conclusions.
=== Coherentism ===
In contrast to the view that science rests on foundational assumptions, coherentism asserts
that statements are justified by being a part of a coherent system. Or, rather, individual
statements cannot be validated on their own: only coherent systems can be justified. A
prediction of a transit of Venus is justified by its being coherent with broader beliefs
about celestial mechanics and earlier observations. As explained above, observation is a cognitive
act. That is, it relies on a pre-existing understanding, a systematic set of beliefs.
An observation of a transit of Venus requires a huge range of auxiliary beliefs, such as
those that describe the optics of telescopes, the mechanics of the telescope mount, and
an understanding of celestial mechanics. If the prediction fails and a transit is not
observed, that is likely to occasion an adjustment in the system, a change in some auxiliary
assumption, rather than a rejection of the theoretical system.In fact, according to the
Duhem–Quine thesis, after Pierre Duhem and W. V. Quine, it is impossible to test a theory
in isolation. One must always add auxiliary hypotheses in order to make testable predictions.
For example, to test Newton's Law of Gravitation in the solar system, one needs information
about the masses and positions of the Sun and all the planets. Famously, the failure
to predict the orbit of Uranus in the 19th century led not to the rejection of Newton's
Law but rather to the rejection of the hypothesis that the solar system comprises only seven
planets. The investigations that followed led to the discovery of an eighth planet,
Neptune. If a test fails, something is wrong. But there is a problem in figuring out what
that something is: a missing planet, badly calibrated test equipment, an unsuspected
curvature of space, or something else.One consequence of the Duhem–Quine thesis is
that one can make any theory compatible with any empirical observation by the addition
of a sufficient number of suitable ad hoc hypotheses. Karl Popper accepted this thesis,
leading him to reject naïve falsification. Instead, he favored a "survival of the fittest"
view in which the most falsifiable scientific theories are to be preferred.
=== Anything goes methodology ===
Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) argued that no description of scientific method could
possibly be broad enough to include all the approaches and methods used by scientists,
and that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress
of science. He argued that "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything
goes".Feyerabend said that science started as a liberating movement, but that over time
it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid and had some oppressive features. and thus
had become increasingly an ideology. Because of this, he said it was impossible to come
up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology.
He saw the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society as authoritarian
and ungrounded. Promulgation of this epistemological anarchism earned Feyerabend the title of "the
worst enemy of science" from his detractors.
=== Sociology of scientific knowledge methodology ===
According to Kuhn, science is an inherently communal activity which can only be done as
part of a community. For him, the fundamental difference between science and other disciplines
is 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. For them, social factors play an important
and direct role in scientific method, but they do not serve to differentiate science
from other disciplines. On this account, science is socially constructed, though this does
not necessarily imply the more radical notion that reality itself is a social construct.
However, some (such as Quine) do maintain that scientific reality is a social construct:
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries
not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable,
epistemologically, to the gods of Homer ... For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in
physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe
otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods
differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only
as cultural posits. The public backlash of scientists against
such views, particularly in the 1990s, became known as the science wars.A major development
in recent decades has been the study of the formation, structure, and evolution of scientific
communities by sociologists and anthropologists - including David Bloor, Harry Collins, Bruno
Latour, and Anselm Strauss. Concepts and methods (such as rational choice, social choice or
game theory) from economics have also been applied for understanding the efficiency of
scientific communities in the production of knowledge. This interdisciplinary field has
come to be known as science and technology studies.
Here the approach to the philosophy of science is to study how scientific communities actually
operate.
=== Continental philosophy === Philosophers in the continental philosophical
tradition are not traditionally categorized as philosophers of science. However, they
have much to say about science, some of which has anticipated themes in the analytical tradition.
For example, Friedrich Nietzsche advanced the thesis in his "The Genealogy of Morals"
that the motive for search of truth in sciences is a kind of ascetic ideal.
In general, science in continental philosophy is viewed from a world-historical perspective.
One of the first philosophers who supported this view was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Philosophers such as Pierre Duhem and Gaston Bachelard also wrote their works with this
world-historical approach to science, predating Kuhn by a generation or more. All of these
approaches involve a historical and sociological turn to science, with a priority on lived
experience (a kind of Husserlian "life-world"), rather than a progress-based or anti-historical
approach as done in the analytic tradition. This emphasis can be traced through Edmund
Husserl's phenomenology, the late works of Merleau-Ponty (Nature: Course Notes from the
Collège de France, 1956–1960), and Martin Heidegger's hermeneutics.The largest effect
on the continental tradition with respect to science was Martin Heidegger's critique
of the theoretical attitude in general which of course includes the scientific attitude.
For this reason the continental tradition has remained much more skeptical of the importance
of science in human life and philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, there have been a number
of important works: especially a Kuhnian precursor, Alexandre Koyré. Another important development
was that of Michel 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.
Post-Heideggerian authors contributing to the continental philosophy of science in the
second half of the 20th century include Jürgen Habermas (e.g., "Truth and Justification",
1998), Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker ("The Unity of Nature", 1980), and Wolfgang Stegmüller
("Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschafttheorie und Analytischen Philosophie", 1973–1986).
== Other topics ==
=== Reductionism ===
Analysis is the activity of breaking an observation or theory down into simpler concepts in order
to understand it. Reductionism can refer to one of several philosophical positions related
to this approach. One type of reductionism is the belief that all fields of study are
ultimately amenable to scientific explanation. Perhaps a historical event might be explained
in sociological and psychological terms, which in turn might be described in terms of human
physiology, which in turn might be described in terms of chemistry and physics. Daniel
Dennett distinguishes legitimate reductionism from what he calls greedy reductionism, which
denies real complexities and leaps too quickly to sweeping generalizations.
=== Social accountability ===
A broad issue affecting the neutrality of science concerns the areas which science chooses
to explore, that is, what part of the world and man is studied by science. 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 have 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 themselves in the end to be
unscientific.
== Philosophy of particular sciences == There is no such thing as philosophy-free
science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
In addition to addressing the general questions regarding science and induction, many philosophers
of science are occupied by investigating foundational problems in particular sciences. They also
examine the implications of particular sciences for broader philosophical questions. The late
20th and early 21st century has seen a rise in the number of practitioners of philosophy
of a particular science.
=== Philosophy of statistics ===
The problem of induction discussed above is seen in another form in debates over the foundations
of statistics. The standard approach to statistical hypothesis testing avoids claims about whether
evidence supports a hypothesis or makes it more probable. Instead, the typical test yields
a p-value, which is the probability of the evidence being such as it is, under the assumption
that the hypothesis being tested is true. If the p-value is too low, the hypothesis
is rejected, in a way analogous to falsification. In contrast, Bayesian inference seeks to assign
probabilities to hypotheses. Related topics in philosophy of statistics include probability
interpretations, overfitting, and the difference between correlation and causation.
=== Philosophy of mathematics ===
Philosophy of mathematics is concerned with the philosophical foundations and implications
of mathematics. The central questions are whether numbers, triangles, and other mathematical
entities exist independently of the human mind and what is the nature of mathematical
propositions. Is asking whether "1+1=2" is true fundamentally different from asking whether
a ball is red? Was calculus invented or discovered? A related question is whether learning mathematics
requires experience or reason alone. What does it mean to prove a mathematical theorem
and how does one know whether a mathematical proof is correct? Philosophers of mathematics
also aim to clarify the relationships between mathematics and logic, human capabilities
such as intuition, and the material universe.
=== Philosophy of physics ===
Philosophy of physics is the study of the fundamental, philosophical questions underlying
modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The main questions
concern the nature of space and time, atoms and atomism. Also included are the predictions
of cosmology, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the foundations of statistical
mechanics, causality, determinism, and the nature of physical laws. Classically, several
of these questions were studied as part of metaphysics (for example, those about causality,
determinism, and space and time).
=== Philosophy of chemistry ===
Philosophy of chemistry is the philosophical study of the methodology and content of the
science of chemistry. It is explored by philosophers, chemists, and philosopher-chemist teams. It
includes research on general philosophy of science issues as applied to chemistry. For
example, can all chemical phenomena be explained by quantum mechanics or is it not possible
to reduce chemistry to physics? For another example, chemists have discussed the philosophy
of how theories are confirmed in the context of confirming reaction mechanisms. Determining
reaction mechanisms is difficult because they cannot be observed directly. Chemists can
use a number of indirect measures as evidence to rule out certain mechanisms, but they are
often unsure if the remaining mechanism is correct because there are many other possible
mechanisms that they have not tested or even thought of. Philosophers have also sought
to clarify the meaning of chemical concepts which do not refer to specific physical entities,
such as chemical bonds.
=== Philosophy of Earth sciences === The philosophy of Earth science is concerned
with how humans obtain and verify knowledge of the workings of the Earth system, including
the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere (solid earth). Earth scientists' ways of
knowing and habits of mind share important commonalities with other sciences but also
have distinctive attributes that emerge from the complex, heterogeneous, unique, long-lived,
and non-manipulatable nature of the Earth system.
=== Philosophy of biology ===
Philosophy of biology deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological
and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have
long been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and even Kant), philosophy
of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Philosophers of science began to pay increasing attention to developments in biology, from
the rise of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure
of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering.
Other key ideas such as the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions as
well as the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience are also addressed.
Research in current philosophy of biology includes investigation of the foundations
of evolutionary theory (such as Peter Godfrey-Smith's work), and the role of viruses as persistent
symbionts in host genomes. As a consequence the evolution of genetic content order is
seen as the result of competent genome editors in contrast to former narratives in which
error replication events (mutations) dominated.
=== Philosophy of medicine ===
Beyond medical ethics and bioethics, the philosophy of medicine is a branch of philosophy that
includes the epistemology and ontology/metaphysics of medicine. Within the epistemology of medicine,
evidence-based medicine (EBM) (or evidence-based practice (EBP)) has attracted attention, most
notably the roles of randomisation, blinding and placebo controls. Related to these areas
of investigation, ontologies of specific interest to the philosophy of medicine include Cartesian
dualism, the monogenetic conception of disease and the conceptualization of 'placebos' and
'placebo effects'. There is also a growing interest in the metaphysics of medicine, particularly
the idea of causation. Philosophers of medicine might not only be interested in how medical
knowledge is generated, but also in the nature of such phenomena. Causation is of interest
because the purpose of much medical research is to establish causal relationships, e.g.
what causes disease, or what causes people to get better.
=== Philosophy of psychology ===
Philosophy of psychology refers to issues at the theoretical foundations of modern psychology.
Some of these issues are epistemological concerns about the methodology of psychological investigation.
For example, is the best method for studying psychology to focus only on the response of
behavior to external stimuli or should psychologists focus on mental perception and thought processes?
If the latter, an important question is how the internal experiences of others can be
measured. Self-reports of feelings and beliefs may not be reliable because, even in cases
in which there is no apparent incentive for subjects to intentionally deceive in their
answers, self-deception or selective memory may affect their responses. Then even in the
case of accurate self-reports, how can responses be compared across individuals? Even if two
individuals respond with the same answer on a Likert scale, they may be experiencing very
different things. Other issues in philosophy of psychology are
philosophical questions about the nature of mind, brain, and cognition, and are perhaps
more commonly thought of as part of cognitive science, or philosophy of mind. For example,
are humans rational creatures? Is there any sense in which they have free will, and how
does that relate to the experience of making choices? Philosophy of psychology also closely
monitors contemporary work conducted in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and
artificial intelligence, questioning what they can and cannot explain in psychology.
Philosophy of psychology is a relatively young field, because psychology only became a discipline
of its own in the late 1800s. In particular, neurophilosophy has just recently become its
own field with the works of Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland. Philosophy of mind,
by contrast, has been a well-established discipline since before psychology was a field of study
at all. It is concerned with questions about the very nature of mind, the qualities of
experience, and particular issues like the debate between dualism and monism. Another
related field is philosophy of language. A notable recent development in Philosophy
of Psychology is Functional Contextualism or Contextual Behavioural Science (CBS). Functional
Contextualism is a modern philosophy of science rooted in philosophical pragmatism and contextualism.
It is most actively developed in behavioral science in general, the field of behavior
analysis, and contextual behavioral science in particular (see the entry for the Association
for Contextual Behavioral Science). Functional contextualism serves as the basis of a theory
of language known as relational frame theory[1] and its most prominent application, acceptance
and commitment therapy (ACT).[2] It is an extension and contextualistic interpretation
of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism first delineated by Steven C. Hayes which emphasizes
the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events (including thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors) with precision, scope, and depth, by focusing on manipulable variables
in their context.
=== Philosophy of psychiatry ===
Philosophy of psychiatry explores philosophical questions relating to psychiatry and mental
illness. The philosopher of science and medicine Dominic Murphy identifies three areas of exploration
in the philosophy of psychiatry. The first concerns the examination of psychiatry as
a science, using the tools of the philosophy of science more broadly. The second entails
the examination of the concepts employed in discussion of mental illness, including the
experience of mental illness, and the normative questions it raises. The third area concerns
the links and discontinuities between the philosophy of mind and psychopathology.
=== Philosophy of economics ===
Philosophy of economics is the branch of philosophy which studies philosophical issues relating
to economics. It can also be defined as the branch of economics which studies its own
foundations and morality. It can be categorized into three central topics. The first concerns
the definition and scope of economics and by what methods it should be studied and whether
these methods rise to the level of epistemic reliability associated with the other special
sciences. For example, is it possible to research economics in such a way that it is value-free,
establishing facts that are independent of the normative views of the researcher? The
second topic is the meaning and implications of rationality. For example, can buying lottery
tickets (increasing the riskiness of your income) at the same time as buying insurance
(decreasing the riskiness of your income) be rational? The third topic is the normative
evaluation of economic policies and outcomes. What criteria should be used to determine
whether a given public policy is beneficial for society?
=== Philosophy of social science ===
The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic and method of the social sciences,
such as sociology, anthropology, and political science. Philosophers of social science are
concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences,
causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and
the ontological significance of structure and agency.
The French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), established the epistemological perspective
of positivism in The Course in Positivist Philosophy, a series of texts published between
1830 and 1842. The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical
sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas
the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of social science: "sociologie". For Comte,
the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel
its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself.
Comte offers an evolutionary system proposing that society undergoes three phases in its
quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. These are (1) the theological,
(2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.Comte's positivism established the initial philosophical
foundations for formal sociology and social research. Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are more
typically cited as the fathers of contemporary social science. In psychology, a positivistic
approach has historically been favoured in behaviourism. Positivism has also been espoused
by 'technocrats' who believe in the inevitability of social progress through science and technology.The
positivist perspective has been associated with 'scientism'; the view that the methods
of the natural sciences may be applied to all areas of investigation, be it philosophical,
social scientific, or otherwise. Among most social scientists and historians, orthodox
positivism has long since lost popular support. Today, practitioners of both social and physical
sciences instead take into account the distorting effect of observer bias and structural limitations.
This scepticism has been facilitated by a general weakening of deductivist accounts
of science by philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn, and new philosophical movements such
as critical realism and neopragmatism. The philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas has
critiqued pure instrumental rationality as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes something
akin to ideology itself.
== See also ==
== Footnotes ==
== Sources ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Philosophy of science at PhilPapers Philosophy of science at the Indiana Philosophy
Ontology Project "Philosophy of science". Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.