Philosophy of Science

Introduction

• Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy focused on the foundations, methods, and implications of science.

• It addresses key questions such as the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the purpose and meaning of science as a human activity.

• It examines metaphysical, epistemic, and semantic aspects of scientific practice.

• Philosophy of science overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, especially when exploring science’s relationship to truth.

• It is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorizing and meta-studies of scientific practice.

• Ethical issues like bioethics and scientific misconduct are often studied under ethics or science studies, not philosophy of science.

• There is no contemporary consensus on many central problems, such as whether science can infer truth about unobservable entities and whether inductive reasoning yields definite scientific knowledge.

• Philosophers of science also address philosophical problems within specific sciences like biology, physics, economics, and psychology.

• Some philosophers use contemporary scientific results to draw conclusions about philosophy itself.

• Though philosophical thought on science dates back to Aristotle, the philosophy of science as a distinct discipline emerged in the 20th century with the logical positivist movement.

• Logical positivism aimed to establish criteria for the meaningfulness and objective assessment of philosophical statements.

• Karl Popper criticized logical positivism and helped establish modern scientific methodology standards.

• Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, challenged the idea of scientific progress as steady and cumulative, introducing the concept of paradigms defining scientific disciplines historically.

• The coherentist approach to science, supported by W. V. Quine and others, validates theories by their coherence with observations as part of a whole.

• Some thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould base science on axiomatic assumptions such as the uniformity of nature.

• A minority, including Paul Feyerabend, reject the idea of a single “scientific method,” arguing that all approaches to science, including supernatural ones, should be allowed.

• Another approach studies how knowledge is created from a sociological perspective, represented by scholars like David Bloor and Barry Barnes.

• A tradition in continental philosophy analyzes science through the lens of human experience.

• Philosophies of particular sciences cover questions like the nature of time in Einstein’s general relativity and economic implications for public policy.

• A key theme is whether one scientific theory’s terms can be reduced intra- or intertheoretically to another, e.g., can chemistry be reduced to physics or sociology to individual psychology?

• General philosophy of science questions appear more specifically in particular sciences, such as validity of reasoning in statistics and defining science in medicine.

• Philosophies of biology, psychology, and social sciences examine whether studies of human nature can be objective or are inevitably influenced by values and social relations.

Background

• Social science, specifically sociology, is a formal body of knowledge that has grown, evolved, and created a community of scholars with a distinctive tradition of learning.

• It has a method, a set of principles or guidelines for observing social reality and constructing a systematic body of knowledge, which is its philosophy.

• Here, philosophy means a way of seeing, observing, thinking, arguing, and arriving at truth, not in a metaphysical or spiritual sense.

• Understanding the philosophy of social science is crucial to comprehend how social scientists think, argue, and construct knowledge of society, and how this differs from other branches of knowledge.

• Unlike epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata that provide rich narratives of social history, modern historians use a different method for constructing history.

• Modern historians may use epics as sources but do not aim to glorify, condemn, or mythologize the past; they strive to be neutral, rely on all possible facts, and write about politico-economic life, social formations, and technologies of the period.

• Modern history is considered a science based on hard facts and empirical evidence, not fiction, narrative, or mythology.

• M.N. Srinivas’s concept of “Sanskritization” (1966) showed how lower castes emulate upper castes based on empirical evidence, contrasting with rigid textual accounts of caste in scriptures.

• The sociological reading of caste based on fieldwork is qualitatively different from scriptural views.

• Mythologies, folk tales, epics, travelogues, and literature provide many sources about human society but do not define modern social science.

• Modern social science is defined by its philosophy, method of enquiry, and ways of acquiring knowledge.

• Hence, history is not mythology, cultural anthropology is not travelogue, sociology is not journalism, and political science is not an election speech.

• This does not imply that mythology, travelogue, journalism, or election speeches are false, but their methodology differs qualitatively from social science.

• Social science is a formal, structured body of knowledge with its own technical idioms, vocabulary, data collection methods, and ways of arriving at generalizations.

• Social scientists are considered objective and value-neutral, relying on hard empirical facts.

• Social science accounts are not ideological, subjective, or valorizing/condemning social reality.

• Understanding this methodology is akin to comprehending the philosophy of modern science that defines social science’s identity.