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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.
Pseudoscience is any body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be scientific but does not follow the scientific method. Pseudosciences may appear scientific, but they do not adhere to the scientific method's falsifiability requirement. There is no bright line between science and pseudo-science, and at times many of the most successful theories have been called unscientific. For example, Copernican physicists had no data to support their theories for centuries, while the Aristotleans had all empiricism on their side.
After over a century of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in varied fields, and despite broad agreement on the basics of scientific method, the boundaries between science and non-science continue to be debated. This is known as the demarcation problem.
It was on this page that Galileo first noted an observation of the moons of Jupiter. This observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth. Galileo published a full description in Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610.
"The complete is more than the sum of its pieces."
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Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American intellectual, most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR). In SSR, he presented the idea that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts", in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions".
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