Philosophy of Science

Lau. Mendoza
Defining The Field
It is NOT a history of science
It is NOT a psychology or sociology of science
It is NOT a cosmology or philosophy of nature

What is it then?
First, we must be aware of the fact that the various sciences make certain claims
about the nature of the universe and human beings.
In the process of making these claims, scientists use concepts such as cause and
effect, theory, hypothesis, prediction, laws of nature, etc.
They examine these concepts and ask questions about them.

SCIENTISTS: The universe is governed by laws of nature such as gravity and

entropy.
PHILOSOPY OF SCIENCE: What is a law of nature?
How do we know if there are really laws of nature?
How do we know that gravity is something that exists if it
is not something that we directly see?
Philosophy of Science as a
Critique of Science
Philosophers also ask whether science is superior or inferior to the
other field of inquiry such as (theology, art, philosophy)

A lot of people claim that truth is discovered not through theology or

philosophy or art but through science.

Gripaldo, R. (2005). The Philosophical Language. Philippine National Philosophical Research Society: Manila, Philippines.
Major Issues in the Field
1. What is science and what distinguishes or makes it superior to the other
modes of knowledge-inquiry?
2. Does science use any special method which other modes of inquiry lack in? If
so, why, what are its origins, and how does one know it is a rational method?
3. Is science primarily, deductive, inductive, or a mixture of both?
4. To what degree is science objective? What proof is there that it is universally
applicable?
5. Can science tell us what the world is really like, or is scientific knowledge also
limited by our conceptual apparatus and experiences? (Kant: priori
conditions)
6. What is, if any, the relationship between language and science? Is science
limited by it?
7. Is science value-free? If not, does that undermine scientific claims?
8. What are scientific theories and how are they constructed? How are
competing theories set as accepted and rejected explanations? (Newton &
Einstein: gravity)
9. What is a scientific explanation? What differentiates it from the explanations
of other fields?
10. What is a Law of Nature? What makes them uniform, rational claims?
11. What guarantees the existence of non-observable entities? (Becher: Phlogiston)
12.Has science made progress within the centuries or is it just a textbook myth?
13.Is there such a thing as a logic of discovery, a process to which discoveries are
made?
14.Can some sciences be reduced to other more fundamental sciences?
15.Is there a fundamental difference between empirical/natural sciences and
human/social sciences? Should they operate under one method?
16.What are the epistemological & metaphysical implications of the latest scientific
findings? (relativity, quantum physics)
17.Are scientific truths cross-cultural and ahistorical or do they vary per period and
culture?
18.Is there such a thing as a brute fact, or is everything influenced by experience,
expectations, beliefs, and value systems?
Philosophy of Science before Kuhn
The period before Thomas Kuhns The structure of scientific revolutions (1996)

Philosophers generally regarded science as a rational enterprise with strict standards

and guaranteed
Logical positivists: generally the first philosophers of science who were disturbed by the
nonsense being passed around as truth.
Metaphysical: statements and theories that were passed around as truths even if
they were not grounded upon verifiable facts.
Logical positivists -Coined from August Comte
-Moritz Schlick
-Rudolf Carnap
-A.J. Ayer (
Objective: to show that statements not grounded upon verifiable observation were
unscientific
For a statement to be meaningful it must pass a test of undergoing a set of operations
which will enable one to check if the statement is true or false

 Angels exist and the unconscious mind represses painful experiences

cannot be checked for truth or falsity because they make references to entities
that cannot be observed.

MAJOR PROBLEM!!
Physicists always made references to entities which were unobservable such
as electrons, photons, electrical fields and so on and so forth.
-Still meaningful and scientific provided there was some sort of
bridge between these entities and the language used to talk about them.
All meaningful sentences must be verifiable is itself not verifiable.
Karl Popper: Like the positivists science was both rational and cumulative but
unlike the positivists he disagreed that unverifiable statements were meaningless
Meaningful but not scientific
-demarcation problem: What is the difference between scientific and non-
scientific hypothesis or theories?
 Poppers principle of Imre Lakatos
Falsifiability
a hypothesis is scientific
is and only if there is
some way by which it
can be falsified by
means of some
experiment; if a crucial
experiment cannot be
constructed that can
potentially falsify the
hypothesis, then even if
it is meaningful, it is not
scientific
-criticized Poppers view
stating that rejecting a
hypothesis due to this
principle would be unwise
because the failure of the
experiment may be due to
an error in design and may
just need to be modified.
-he believes that every
theory has a hard core
which cannot be falsified
by experiments.
-some feature can be
modified without touching
its internal structure.
For Popper, a theory is only scientific if is empirically falsifiable, that
is if it is possible to specify observation statements which would
prove it wrong.

A theory is good science, the sort of theory you should stick with
(though not the sort of thing you should believe as Popper did not
believe in belief), if it is refutable, risky, and problem-solving and
has stood up to successive attempts at refutation. It must be highly
falsifiable, well-tested but (thus far) unfalsified.
 The Received view of science
Science is cumulative
Science is unified
There is a single set of fundamental methods for all sciences and that the
natural sciences at least are all reducible to physics
There is an epistemologically crucial distinction between the context of discovery
and justification
There is and underlying logic implicit in scientific evaluations when confirming or
falsifying the evidence of a hypothesis
There is a demarcation between scientific theories and other kinds of belief
systems
There is a distinction between observational and theoretical terms, as well as
theoretical statements and those describing the results of experiments
Scientific terms have fixed and precise meanings
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
The structure of scientific revolutions (SSR)
-The history of science is a history of changes in
paradigms
PARADIGM: set of beliefs, definitions and
metaphysical assumptions that work together
to help us derive meaning out of certain
elements in the world
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
Science proceeds normally until a crisis occurs.
This crisis occurs when certain features of the
world can no longer be explained by the current
theory.
REVOLUTION: a change of paradigm
NORMAL SCIENCE: editing the new paradigm

Gripaldo, R. (2005). The Philosophical Language. Philippine National Philosophical Research Society: Manila, Philippines.
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
He believes that science is not cumulative (1)
Incrementalism: Later science gets more correct than
earlier science; and what science gets correct once,
stays correct once and for all science doesnt go
backwards.
Gestalt shift: Revolutions in science have been
discontinuous.
Scientific theories from other paradigms are
incommensurable because terms change their
meanings from one paradigm to the next.
To regard the replacement of a paradigm with another
as an improvement is misleading
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
He believes that science is not very unified (2)
an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of
personal and historical accident, is always a
formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a
given scientific community at a given time

Gripaldo, R. (2005). The Philosophical Language. Philippine National Philosophical Research Society: Manila, Philippines.
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
He saw that the values held by a particular
scientific community also determines what is
to count as relevant in an experiment, and
what is to count as a relevant fact (4)
theory testing is not as straightforward as is often
implied because, when experiment conflicts with
a scientific theory, logic alone does not tell us
which of the components of the theoretical
system is at fault
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
Distinction between scientific theories and
other kinds of beliefs (5)
What was once scientific is regarded as a myth
when it is replaced by a new paradigm, and a new
paradigm adopted by scientists ceases to be
regarded as scientific when it is replaced once
again by another
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
He also pointed out along with Hanson (1958)
that the observations are theory-laden (6)
We would not know which facts or observations
are relevant.

Gripaldo, R. (2005). The Philosophical Language. Philippine National Philosophical Research Society: Manila, Philippines.
 Kuhns Critique of the Received view
Lastly, he believes that scientific term cannot
have precise meanings (7)
When one paradigm replaces another, the
meanings of the terms used begin to change

Gripaldo, R. (2005). The Philosophical Language. Philippine National Philosophical Research Society: Manila, Philippines.
 Philosophy of science after Kuhn
Because of Kuhns SSR, two major advancements
developed.
1. Social Constructivism
The world as we know it is constructed by the
theories that we use to make sense of it.
Klee (1997) a term referring to an increasingly
popular philosophical position in which the
objects of our knowledge are held to be either
wholly or partly constructed by our coming to
know them in the way they do
Philosophy of science after Kuhn
Change can be interpreted as:
Psychological change of worldview
Actual change of the world itself
Latour & Woolgar: practitioners of science become
deluded into thinking that they are discovering a
reality that is already in existence rather than
constructing a reality by artificial means
 Philosophy of science after Kuhn
2. Feminist Philosophies of Science
The claims of science have been socially
constructed, and that of which largely by men
Harding tried to show how the kind of errors
made in science have come about as a results of
gender bias
men are too psychologically damaged to be the ones
doing most of the science
Philosophy of science after Kuhn
Helen Longino (1990) also stated that the errors
science has made over the centuries can be
corrected by a feminist-inspired critique of the
sciences
 Last Thoughts
Science may not be all that we think it is, it
must be subjected to critique like everything
else because it is very powerful
Is science really the last say in decision-
making?
What makes it superior to the other fields?
The best way is to reflect upon the issues like
Kuhn & whether his views of science make
sense of them