What is Philosophy of Science?

Dean Rickles

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509534180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Philosophy of science puts science itself under the microscope: What exactly is science? How do its explanations of the world differ from those of other subjects, including so-called "pseudo-sciences"? How should we understand and evaluate scientific methods? What, if anything, can science tell us about the nature of physical reality? Dean Rickles guides beginners through the central topics in philosophy of science. He looks at the origins and evolution of the field, the issues that arise when distinguishing between science and non-science, the concepts of logic and associated problems, scientific realism and anti-realism, and the nature of scientific models and representing. Rickles brings the subject to sparkling life with a user-friendly tone and rich, real-world examples. What is Philosophy of Science? is the must-have primer for students getting to grips with this broad-ranging and important topic.

1
Philosophy, Science, and History

I am assuming that the reader I am addressing is an absolute beginner, taking (or thinking of taking) a philosophy of science course for the first time; or perhaps a non-student simply wishing to have a better critical understanding of science. It’s no easy task to state exactly what science is (indeed, that is one of the chief problems tackled by philosophers of science), and so it is doubly difficult to spell out what one means by “philosophy of science.” But this book aims to do just that. We begin in this chapter with some, at this stage very loose (and slightly repetitive – to drill some major themes in), remarks about the nature of philosophy, the nature of science, and their union. Then we present the subject through its history, describing, in very broad brushstrokes, the key stages leading to the kinds of issues discussed by the philosophers of science of today. We start by sweeping aside some common misconceptions about the nature of philosophy.

Common Myths About Philosophy

Since many reading this (perhaps most, in fact) will not be philosophy students, it might be a good idea to say something about why you should study philosophy of science, and also to dispel some common myths about philosophy in general. A very entrenched myth is the following:

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Philosophy is neither right nor wrong, so why bother wasting our time with it?

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This is probably the most common myth about the nature of philosophy, and though it may be true for some areas of philosophy (I’m not naming names …), there are many positions once held in the philosophy of science that are unanimously agreed (amongst philosophers of science) to be wrong – we will come across many of these, for their problems are still instructive. For example, Karl Popper’s famous position called “falsificationism” – according to which science works by deducing testable consequences from theories (or conjectures) and then attempting to refute these consequences with experiments, the theory then surviving or dying depending on what happens – is just plain wrong as a “descriptive” account of how science and scientists actually work. For the most part, scientists just don’t operate in this way. As a “prescriptive” account (namely, as an account of what scientists ought to be doing) it is false too, and perhaps dangerous, for if scientists were to follow this scientific method to the letter, many advances in science would have been lost (we cover this in later chapters).

Next myth (primarily espoused by scientists who refuse to engage with philosophy):

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Philosophy is not rigorous and so is too wishy-washy to take seriously!

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Again, there are writings of philosophers for which this is probably true (ok, now I’m naming names: Derrida!), but much of philosophy (certainly Western, analytic philosophy) is very much rigorous (hence “analytic”). Much of this has to do with the fact that logic, argument, and reason are central to analytic philosophy. Philosophy of science is especially rigorous in this respect, and often goes further by using probability and other branches of mathematics to formalize its arguments – it is in many ways more rigorous than much of science. Specializing to philosophy of particular sciences (philosophy of physics, biology, etc.) increases this level, and indeed most philosophers of these particular scientific subjects (and of philosophy of science in general) generally have a background in some science or other, as mentioned in the preface.

Last myth:

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Philosophy is useless, so philosophy of science must be too!

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This is a pretty common view too. In order to properly convince you that it is wrongheaded, you’ll have to read on, and continue your studies beyond this, and then see what you think afterwards. For now, let me use an ipse dixit argument (translation: “he himself said it” – appeal to an impressive/smart person’s credibility!). Basically, during every fundamental revolution – in physics at any rate – the scientists involved have considered themselves “natural philosophers”: Newton, Leibniz, Mach, Boltzmann, Poincaré, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Einstein (of course), and many others have written philosophical texts. Ronald Fisher, the statistician who first used randomization as an experimental tool in biology (agriculture, in fact), was also very interested in philosophical issues, especially those having to do with causation, explanation, and laws. Fisher was essentially responding to the work of J. S. Mill, another philosopher who dabbled in many sciences – these ideas were then applied in medicine by Austin Bradford Hill (resulting in the randomized controlled trial), who again was intensely interested in philosophical aspects of causation, evidence, and inference. In each case they themselves directly acknowledge the utility of their philosophical reflections in leading them to explore new territory. Indeed, philosophical argument seems to have been vital in many such cases. Einstein acknowledges that his special theory of relativity owed much to his reading of David Hume (a Scottish philosopher we will encounter often throughout this book). This shift to philosophy is happening again in physics, since seemingly a new revolution is needed to merge a pair of theories (quantum theory and general relativity) that make apparently very different claims about the nature of space and time – this has resulted in increased dialogue between physicists and philosophers. If you don’t understand this, don’t worry: the point is, many of the greatest scientists who ever lived have been philosophers as much as scientists, and often the mark of a brilliant scientist is a dual philosophical mindset. If the past is any guide, doing some philosophy will make you a success, and wealthy beyond your wildest dreams! (Well, perhaps that last one is an exaggeration, though many major advances in economics have also had their roots in a philosophical analysis of the foundations of economic theory.)

A First Look at Philosophy of Science

With that little defensive stroke played, let’s turn to the more positive matter of actually saying what philosophy of science is. Well, in fact, let’s start by saying what it isn’t.

• It isn’t a study of the history of science in the sense of looking at how scientists actually made their discoveries, what the conditions were like at the time, how scientists operated in some period, how their methods (of experiment, of reasoning, of disseminating work, etc.) have changed over the centuries. History of science does have a very significant role to play in the philosophy of science – and there is some controversy over just how important it is – but, however they might overlap, they are not the same thing.
• It isn’t the sociology of science in the sense of a study of the way scientists interact, what kinds of social networks they have, how they resolve differences of opinion on various issues, how they decide which theory to choose to work on, generating consensus when there are many possibilities, and so on. These are interesting and valuable tasks, and again they have a role to play in certain philosophical issues (though the extent is, again, controversial), but it is not the same thing as philosophy of science.
• It isn’t the psychology of science in the sense of a study of how scientists think, how they mentally reach their conclusions, what goes on in their heads when they create theories, etc. Again, we may use such information to inform our philosophizing about science, but the two subjects cannot be identified.

What distinguishes philosophy of science from these other, certainly very worthy, enterprises? Well, in each of the above cases there are facts which are discovered. They follow an empirical method, whether empirically observing the scientists themselves (“up-close and personal,” with a notebook to hand), or by looking through texts and other sources, such as notebooks and letters. This is not part of philosophy of science. These are branches of history or of science itself. As a general rule of thumb, we might say: if you have to get up out of your chair to do it then it’s not philosophy! This is only a rule of thumb because many philosophers do “get their hands dirty” doing practical stuff too, but this is generally incidental. So, what is philosophy of science then?

First, what is philosophy? This is a big question to answer in a little section of a little chapter, but we can approximate an answer by saying that philosophy constitutes an inquiry into the world at the most general level possible – see the further readings for good introductory texts. This involves abstract categories such as truth, matter, space, time, causation, mind, morality, reason, etc. But philosophy often focuses in on a particular subject of inquiry, so that we have “the philosophy of χ” (where χ = “science,” “art,” “mind,” “biology,” “law” – i.e. some subject of inquiry which really can be anything at all – there’s even a book on the philosophy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!). When we focus up close in this way, the “philosophy” aspect signals that we have gone “second-order” (“meta-”) in the sense that no longer are we investigating the subject matter of the subject of inquiry. Rather, the subject of inquiry itself becomes a subject of inquiry.

Let’s give a simple example. Music consists of various activities – composing, analyzing scores, performing, etc. – but philosophy of music looks at these activities and their results (compositions, theories about music, performances, etc.) from a philosophical point of view: it asks what music is; whether and how music represents the world (or some mental entity); how there can be multiple, different instances of one and the same piece of music, whether music can truly be “expressive,” and that kind of thing. Likewise, the philosophy of science puts science itself, and its products (theories), in the spotlight. It looks at the methods used by scientists to see if they are as reliable as scientists think. It examines fundamental, central concepts (i.e. concepts that are used but not analyzed by scientists) to see if they are justified and how they can be understood – this process is often involved in the process of revolutionary science. It asks what theories themselves are, what they say about the world, and whether they support a unique worldview, and so on.

There are several core parts of philosophy, and we will be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 Philosophy, Science, and History
• 2 Logic and Philosophy of Science
• 3 Demarcation and the Scientific Method
• 4 The Nature of Scientific Theories
• Index
• End User License Agreement