Philosophy of Science

[Singu]

Before getting into "philosophy of science", it's probably the best to first get the terminologies right.

These are listed in a chronological order and historical appearances:

18th century.

EMPIRICISM (Bacon): The doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, and that we're a "blank slate" to be filled in by nature.

This doctrine freed us from the authority of traditional knowledge, such as the Bible, kings and myths. It transferred knowledge to the level of individuals, and it caused a scientific/democratic revolution that sparked the Enlightenment.

RATIONALISM (Descartes, Kant): The doctrine that all knowledge is derived from the intellect and rationality. We project a model of reality onto the real world, not the other way around.

Again freed us from the authority of tradition, but there was disagreement over which is more true: Is knowledge derived from the intellect, or sensory experience?

INDUCTIVISM (Bacon): A method of obtaining knowledge by generalizing similar and related observations.

DEDUCTIVISM (Descartes, Kant): A method of obtaining knowledge by deducing outcomes from a model.

HYPOTHETICO-DEDUCTIVISM: A scientific method that first proposes a hypothesis, which its deduced outcomes (predictions) are then tested by an observational experiment.

19th century.

INSTRUMENTALISM (Dewey, Peirce, James): The doctrine that scientific theories are to be merely used as an "instrument" to predict outcomes. Its contents are merely a psychological trick, a matter of convenience or a "useful fiction", but they don't have any consequences as a matter of actually describing reality in a literal way.

This doctrine is part of "Scientific Anti-realism", which states that trying to understand the world is meaningless or not possible.

SCIENTIFIC REALISM: The doctrine that scientific theories are literal, although imperfect, descriptions of reality and should be believed as such.

SCIENTIFIC ANTI-REALISM: The doctrine that we're unable to understand or describe reality in a meaningful way, and that we can't fundamentally understand reality and it's pointless to attempt it. This makes all scientific theories NOT a literal description of reality, but rather just a prop or a "useful fiction".

20th century.

LOGICAL POSITIVISM (Russell, Wittgenstein): The doctrine that anything that can't be verified by sensory experience or logical proofs is meaningless.

(NOTE: This doctrine itself can't be verified by sensory experience or logical proofs, and therefore it becomes self-refuting and itself meaningless!)

VERIFICATIONISM: The doctrine that anything that can't be verified and proven to be true in some ways, is meaningless.

FALSIFICATIONISM (Popper): The doctrine that we can never really prove anything to be true in a fundamental way; we can only prove something to be false. We ought to try and prove scientific theories to be false, not true.

(NOTE: this is closely related to "Hypothetico-Deductivism")

CRITICAL RATIONALISM (Popper): The doctrine that we ought to use our rationality to criticize something, rather than to support or prove something in a fundamental way.

PARADIGM SHIFT/SUDDEN CHANGE (Kuhn): The doctrine that science progresses by sudden change or "paradigm shifts", in which each generational changes (different "paradigms") can't be comprehended by another.

GRADUALISM: The doctrine that science is an accumulation of gradual changes and improvements, and that there's a clear logical progression to all scientific progress, and superseded theories still include parts of replaced theories.

POST-MODERNISM: The doctrine that there's no such thing as objective knowledge, and that there are only relative and many different kinds of "truths", such as cultural truths.


WHAT IS SCIENCE?

Science is a special kind of knowledge about the physical world. It's "objective" because it's referring to something that actually happens in the physical world.

WHAT IS NOT SCIENCE?

Any knowledge about the non-physical is not science.

NOTE that this does not mean that "We can't see it, therefore it's not science", because physical things that are not visible to our eyes may still exist.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT PSYCHOLOGY, MATHEMATICS, ETC, ARE NOT SCIENCE?

Not really, since things like psychological states or mathematics can be expressed in physical terms, such as how neurons inside of a brain or atoms inside of a CPU behave, which makes the expressions of those psychology or mathematics possible.