WikiPortalus: Portal:Philosophy of science

The Philosophy of Science Portal

The 'philosophy of science' is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, including the formal sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. In this respect, the philosophy of science is closely related to epistemology and the philosophy of language. Note that issues of scientific ethics are not usually considered to be part of the philosophy of science; they are studied in such fields as bioethics and science studies.

In particular, the philosophy of science considers the following topics: the character and the development of concepts and terms, propositions and hypotheses, arguments and conclusions, as they function in science; the manner in which science explains natural phenomena and predicts natural occurrences; the types of reasoning that are used to arrive at scientific conclusions; the formulation, scope, and limits of scientific method; the means that should be used for determining when scientific information has adequate objective support; and the implications of scientific methods and models, along with the technology that arises from scientific knowledge for the larger society.

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Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy whose primary concerns include the natures of meaning, reference, truth, language learning, language creation, understanding, communication, interpretation, and translation.

The discipline is concerned with five central questions: How are sentences composed into a meaningful whole, and what are the meanings of the parts of sentences? What is the nature of meaning? (i.e., What exactly is a meaning?) What do we do with language? (How do we use it socially?) How does language relate to the mind, both of the speaker and the interpreter? Finally, how does language relate to the world?

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Credit: Hornet magazine

The reaction to Darwin's theory came quickly after the publication of Darwin's theory, following twenty years of development of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin's work was published in On the Origin of Species.

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"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

— Aristotle

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Auguste Comte (full name Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte) (January 17 (recorded January 19), 1798 - September 5, 1857) was a French thinker who coined the term sociology. He is remembered for being the first to apply the scientific method to the social world.

One universal law that Comte saw at work in all sciences he called the 'law of three phases'. It is by his statement of this law that he is best known in the English-speaking world; namely, that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. He also gave the name "Positive" to the last of these because of the polysemous connotations of the word.

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Did you know...

...that a thought experiment uses a hypothetical scenario to help us understand things through a priori, rather than empirical methodology?
...that Paul Feyerabend's theory of epistemological anarchism in the philosophy of science led him to be labeled the "worst enemy of science" by his detractors?
...that the philosophy of biology has grown with the rise of Neodarwinism, the discovery of the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and more recent advances in genetic engineering?
...that Occam's razor argues the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible?
...that Scientism is an ideology which holds that science has primacy over other interpretations of life?
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