Subject
photo credits: Wikimedia Commons
Philosophy of science is a branch 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. 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, 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, general philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivist movement, which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements' meaningfulness and objectively assessing them. 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 and instead of 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.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 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 the terms of one scientific theory can be intra- or intertheoretically 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, psychology, and the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or are inevitably shaped by values and by social relations. Source: Wikipedia (en)
Works about philosophy of science 33
-
The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality)
-
Beyond the Hoax
-
Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction
-
The Meaning of It All
-
Higher Superstition
-
The Myth of the Framework
-
Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence
-
Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science
-
Popper and After
-
The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge
-
Praxisbezug und Theoriebildung: Eine Kritik des Modells entsubjektivierter Wissenschaft
-
Science in a Free Society
-
What Is This Thing Called Science?
-
Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (work level)
-
Philosophy of Natural Science
-
Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science
-
Conjectures and Refutations
-
The Structure of Science
-
Modern science and modern man
-
The Common Sense of Science
-
Science and humanism; physics in our time
-
L'Évolution de la mécanique
-
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
-
Scientologie, Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens
-
La physique depuis vingt ans
-
Science et Méthode / Henri Poincaré
-
La Valeur de la Science / Henri Poincaré
-
La Science et l'Hypothèse / Henri Poincaré
-
Francis Bacon
-
Problems of Empiricism
-
Die Chemie und ihre Methoden
-
Anthropology - why it matters
Subject - wd:Q59115