Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy of Science

The branch of philosophy that studies the methods and presuppositions of scientific inquiry: what justifies moving from a finite set of observations to a general law, what distinguishes a genuinely scientific claim from one that only resembles it, and whether scientific progress reflects a growing grasp of how the world actually is. Central questions include the demarcation between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and whether science can infer truth about unobservable entities. Philosophical thought about science dates back at least to Aristotle, but the field became a distinct discipline only in the twentieth century, following the logical positivist movement and its attempt to set criteria for meaningful and objectively assessable claims. Karl Popper criticized logical positivism and helped establish modern standards for scientific method, and Thomas Kuhn argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that scientific progress is relative to a paradigm rather than a steady, cumulative accumulation of knowledge.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

Scientific realism versus anti-realism: whether well-confirmed theories are approximately true descriptions of an unobservable world, as realists hold, or are useful instruments for prediction whose unobservable posits need not be believed, as instrumentalists and constructive empiricists such as Bas van Fraassen hold. 1

Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism gave anti-realism its most influential modern statement against a realist consensus among working scientists.

Central Question

What justifies inferring a general law from a finite set of past observations, when the inference itself cannot be guaranteed by logic alone? 1

Key Debate

The problem of induction: Hume argued that no amount of past regularity can be shown, by reason or by experience, to guarantee that an unobserved case will conform to it, since the inference from past to future itself already assumes the very uniformity in question, leaving science's most basic method without a demonstrative justification. 1

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Hume's Unanswerable Question

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Every morning the sun has risen. On that basis, everyone expects it to rise tomorrow. Hume's question is not whether this expectation is reasonable in some loose, practical sense, everyone has it and could hardly function without it, but whether there is any argument, any chain of reasoning, that could justify it as more than habit dressed up as knowledge. Try to supply one, and the options narrow fast. You cannot justify the inference by an argument from pure logic, because there is no contradiction in supposing the sun fails to rise tomorrow; a rising sun is not contained in the concept of yesterday's sunrise. So the justification would have to come from experience instead, from the observation that nature has been uniform in the past. But that is exactly the premise in question, restated. To argue nature will keep behaving uniformly because it has always behaved uniformly assumes the very principle, that the future resembles the past, that needs justifying, which makes the argument circular rather than a genuine proof. Hume's own answer was not skepticism about crossing the street; he thought custom and habit did the practical work perfectly well, and that no one, including Hume, actually lived as though induction might fail at any moment. What he denied was that reason alone, unaided by habit, could underwrite the inference. This leaves the whole of experimental science resting, at its foundation, on a habit rather than a proof, an uncomfortable place for a discipline that prides itself on proof, and the reason the problem of induction still opens every serious discussion of what scientific method can and cannot deliver.

Why Science Still Works Anyway

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hume's problem does not stop laboratories from running experiments, and it is worth asking why not, since nobody has actually solved it in the sense of supplying the demonstrative proof he showed was missing. Part of the answer is practical: a habit that has never once failed, however philosophically ungrounded, is still the only tool anyone has, and refusing to use it buys nothing, since the alternative is not a better method but no method at all. Part of the answer is a change of question. Twentieth century philosophy of science largely stopped trying to justify induction directly and asked instead whether science needs it at all. One influential answer holds that science does not confirm theories by accumulating supporting instances, the way induction is usually pictured, but by trying, honestly and severely, to refute them, keeping only the theories that survive serious attempts to break them. On this picture a theory is scientific not because enough sunrises have been observed to prove the next one, but because the theory forbids something, some observation that would count against it, and has been tested against that forbidden possibility and held up. This does not answer Hume's original question so much as route around it: a surviving theory is not proven true, only not yet shown false, which turns out to be a weaker and more honest thing to claim than proof ever was. Whether this fully escapes the problem, or only restates it one level up, since a theory's past survival is itself an inductive basis for trusting its future survival, is exactly the kind of question that keeps philosophy of science a live argument rather than a settled one.

Philosophy of Science

79 entries

Movement

School of Philosophy

Era

Tradition

Nationality

Influenced By

In Group

Birthplace / Region

Adolf Grünbaum

Alexander Bird

Alvin Plantinga

Ann-Sophie Barwich

Bas van Fraassen

Carl Hempel

Charlotte Werndl

Claus Emmeche

David Hume

Deborah Mayo

Elisabeth Nemeth

Elliott Sober

Empedocles

Etienne Vermeersch

Francis Bacon

Georg Henrik von Wright

George Herbert Mead

Hans Reichenbach

Hasok Chang

Heather Douglas

Herbert Feigl

Hilary Putnam

Ian Hacking

Ilkka Niiniluoto

Imre Lakatos

Isabelle Stengers

James T. Cushing

Jan Faye

Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Jesús Padilla Gálvez

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

John Beatty

John Worrall

Katherine Brading

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

Kim Jaegwon

Larry Laudan

Leon Chwistek

Letitia Meynell

Lindley Darden

Lorenz Bruno Puntel

Louis Althusser

Mario Bunge

Mary Leng

Mary Tiles

Max Black

Michał Heller

Michel de Montaigne

Michela Massimi

Moritz Schlick

Nancy Cartwright

Nelson Goodman

Otto Neurath

Patricia Churchland

Paul Churchland

Paul Cilliers

Paul Feyerabend

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Peter Railton

Philip Kitcher

Pierre Duhem

Rachel Ankeny

Richard Swinburne

Robert Grosseteste

Robin Collins

Roger Bacon

Rudolf Carnap

Sabina Leonelli

Sandra Harding

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Simone Weil

Stathis Psillos

Steven French

Susan Haack

Tanabe Hajime

Thomas Kuhn

Wesley Salmon

Willard Van Orman Quine

Wolfgang Stegmüller

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