The Philosophy of Science

A complex area of current inquiry.

Philosophers of science actively study such questions as:

What is a law of nature? Are there any in non-physical sciences like biology and psychology?

What kind of data can be used to distinguish between real causes and accidental regularities?

How much evidence and what kinds of evidence do we need before we accept hypotheses?

Why do scientists continue to rely on models and theories which they know are at least partially inaccurate (like Newton’s physics)?

Though they might seem elementary, these questions are actually quite difficult to answer satisfactorily. Opinions on such issues vary widely within the field (and occasionally part ways with the views of scientists themselves — who mainly spend their time doing science, not analyzing it abstractly).

Though the field is highly specialized, a few touchstone ideas have made their way into the mainstream:

• Epistemology — branch of philosophy that deals with what knowledge is, how we come to accept some things as true, and how we justify that acceptance.
• Empiricism — set of philosophical approaches to building knowledge that emphasizes the importance of observable evidence from the natural world.
• Induction — method of reasoning in which a generalization is argued to be true based on individual examples that seem to fit with that generalization. For example, after observing that trees, bacteria, sea anemones, fruit flies, and humans have cells, one might inductively infer that all organisms have cells.
• Deduction — method of reasoning in which a conclusion is logically reached from premises. For example, if we know the current relative positions of the moon, sun, and Earth, as well as exactly how these move with respect to one another, we can deduce the date and location of the next solar eclipse.
• Parsimony/Occam’s razor — idea that, all other things being equal, we should prefer a simpler explanation over a more complex one.
• Demarcation problem — the problem of reliably distinguishing science from non-science. Modern philosophers of science largely agree that there is no single, simple criterion that can be used to demarcate the boundaries of science.
• Falsification — the view, associated with philosopher Karl Popper, that evidence can only be used to rule out ideas, not to support them. Popper proposed that scientific ideas can only be tested through falsification, never through a search for supporting evidence.
• Paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions — a view of science, associated with philosopher Thomas Kuhn, which suggests that the history of science can be divided up into times of normal science (when scientists add to, elaborate on, and work with a central, accepted scientific theory) and briefer periods of revolutionary science. Kuhn asserted that during times of revolutionary science, anomalies refuting the accepted theory have built up to such a point that the old theory is broken down and a new one is built to take its place in a so-called “paradigm shift.”