Understanding the Philosophy of Science

🎓 james ladyman🤔 philosophy🎓 oxford

🔬 philosci

Key Figures:

- Francis Bacon

- Nicolaus Copernicus

- Immanuel Kant

Key Ideas

What is philosophical

When does theory become fact

Logical Deduction

It is important that all of these aspects are considered holistically.

Highlights

Introduction

In many ways, our age is no different from any other: most people work hard merely to survive, while a few live in the lap of luxury; many perish in wars and conflicts, the causes of which they have no control over; the cycle of birth, reproduction and death is fundamentally the same for us as it was for our distant ancestors.

The products of science and technology have a huge effect on the way we live our lives and how we shape our environment; if you are in any doubt about this, try and imagine going through an average day without using anything powered by electricity or containing plastic.

Science enjoys unparalleled prestige in society compared with other institutions, and everyone is likely to agree about the need to fund and understand modern science, while many may deride modern art or literature. Furthermore, most people are likely to trust the word of a scientist much more than they do that of a journalist, lawyer or politician (although that may not be saying much). Rightly or wrongly, science is often thought to be the ultimate form of objective and rational inquiry, and scientists are widely regarded as being able to gather and interpret evidence and use it to arrive at conclusions that are ‘scientifically proven’ and so not just the product of ideology or prejudice. Courts do not convict or acquit someone of a crime on the say-so of a priest or a novelist, but they do routinely rely to large extent on the evidence of an expert witness who is a scientist of some sort; if a ballistics expert says that a bullet came from a certain direction, or a pathologist says that a person had a certain drug in their system when they died, their testimony will usually be taken as establishing the facts of the case. Most of us consult a doctor when we have something wrong with us and if the doctor prescribes some drug or other therapy we take it assuming that it will help with our symptoms and not itself cause us harm. Often, modern medicine is explicitly claimed to be ‘evidence-based’ and hence scientific. Similarly, if the scientists appointed by the government say that a particular food or chemical is unsafe, its use and sale will be banned.

in almost all areas of modern life, people are likely to seek or rely indirectly upon the scientific evidence and the opinions of scientists before making important decisions. Whether or not we as individuals share this faith in science and scientists, our lives are enormously affected by it, and this is one reason why understanding and thinking about science is important. Of course, most of us know very little science, and the degree of specialisation within particular sciences is now so great that no individual could possibly know all there is to know about any one scientific field let alone all about science in its entirety. For this reason, we have no choice but to rely upon co-operation and co-ordination between many individuals in order to develop further and apply scientific thought.

Questions about, for example, the development of particular scientific disciplines and theories need to be addressed by historians of science, not philosophers. On the other hand, questions like, ‘what sort of personality makes for a good scientist?’ or ‘what role do journals play in the communication and assessment of theories in physics?’ are matters for the psychology or sociology of science, respectively. Philosophical questions about science, like philosophical questions in general, cannot be answered by going out in the world and gathering information, and finding out what happened, or how a particular scientific community is, as a matter of fact, organised; rather, philosophical inquiry proceeds by analysis, argument and debate.

- Essentially philosophy must be grounded within the confines of scientific evolution.

the most fundamental task for the philosophy of science is to answer the question, ‘what is science?’. Given the status of science, this question is of great importance and many philosophers have sought to provide an answer so that it can be used to assess whether beliefs that are claimed to be scientific really are. The problem of saying what is scientific and what is not is called the demarcation problem .

Some people have claimed scientific status for beliefs and practices, such as those of astrology, creationism (the doctrine that God created the Earth a few thousand years ago as stated in the Bible), Marxism and psychoanalysis, and some philosophers have wanted to be able to show that they are not scientific, that they are in fact merely pseudo-scientific. It is usually thought that if there is anything of which science consists it is a method or set of methods, so the study of scientific method (known as methodology of science) is at the centre of the philosophy of science.

It is usual to divide the sciences into two types, namely the natural sciences and the social sciences. The former have as their object of study the natural world and include physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology and biology; the latter study the specifically human or social world and include psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics. Because the social sciences study the behaviour and institutions of human beings, they must deal with meanings, intentional actions and our apparent free will; hence, the philosophical questions they raise are often quit e different from those raised by the natural sciences... For the purposes of this book (and here I follow standard practice) the philosophy of science is the philosophy of natural science.

science is important to philosophy because it seems to offer answers to fundamental philosophical questions. One such question is ‘how can we have knowledge as opposed to mere belief or opinion?’, and one very general answer to it is ‘follow the scientific method’.

The branch of philosophy that inquires into knowledge and justification is called epistemology. The central questions of epistemology include: what is knowledge as opposed to mere belief?; can we be sure that we have any knowledge?; what things do we in fact know?. The first of these is perhaps the most fundamental epistemological question. Each of us has many beliefs, some true and some false.

- Theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? What is knowledge? (Fundamental knowledge is a building block that is largely perceived and believed to be true by the majority in society and that can be built upon). Facts must be indistinguishable and usually science does not produce facts but rather accepted theories which are accepted until disproven: What theories become fact? .

The traditional view in epistemology has been that knowledge can only be claimed when we have an adequate justification for our beliefs, in other words, knowledge is justified true belief. Although recently this ‘tripartite’ definition of knowledge has been the subject of much criticism and debate, justification is still often regarded as necessary for knowledge. This brings us to the issue of what justification amounts to and, as suggested above, justification is often thought to be provided by following scientific methods for testing or arriving at our beliefs (the word science comes from the Latin word scientia, which means knowledge).

The modern scientific picture of the world seems to tell us a great deal, not just about how things are now, but how they were millions and even billions of years ago. Astrophysics tells us about the formation of the Earth, the solar system and even the universe, geophysics tells us about the development of mountains, continents and oceans, and biochemistry and evolutionary biology tell us about the development of life itself. Such scientific theories tell us more about familiar things, so, for example, we may learn where a particular river used to flow or how bees pollinate flowers. However, scientific theories, especially those in physics and chemistry, also describe entities that are not part of our everyday experience, such as molecules, atoms, electromagnetic waves, black holes, and so on. Such theories raise particular problems and questions in the philosophy of science; for example, should we believe in the existence of such esoteric and unobservable entities, and if so, what is to count as evidence for their existence and how do we manage to refer to them? Of course, science does not just describe the world; it also gives us explanations of how and why things are as they are. Often this involves describing unobservable causes of things we observe. Hence, Newton is not famous for discovering that unsupported objects fall to the Earth, he is famous for explaining why they do so (the gravitational force is what causes apples to fall out of trees), and for giving us a law that allows us to calculate the rate at which they do so.