Philosophy of science examines the nature, methods, and limits of scientific knowledge. It investigates questions like: What distinguishes science from non-science? How do observations relate to theories? What makes scientific explanations valid? This course explores major schools of thought that have shaped our understanding of how science works.
Begin with historical case studies (Copernican revolution, germ theory, quantum mechanics) to see how philosophical questions arise from actual scientific practice. Then examine formal criteria (falsifiability, confirmation) and historical accounts of scientific change.
Science is one of the most successful human endeavors ever undertaken — it has produced vaccines, predicted the existence of black holes, and described the structure of matter at the subatomic level. But what exactly *is* science? How does it produce knowledge? And what are its limits? These are the questions philosophy of science investigates, and they turn out to be surprisingly hard.
A natural starting point is the idea that science works by observing the world, collecting facts, and generalizing from them. This picture — sometimes called naive inductivism — has intuitive appeal. But it immediately runs into problems. Observations are never neutral: the questions we ask, the instruments we use, and the significance we assign to data are all shaped by prior theories. When astronomers look at the night sky, they are not simply recording light; they are interpreting signals through a theoretical framework involving spectra, parallax, and gravitational models. Hanson called this the 'theory-ladenness of observation,' and it is a foundational insight of the field.
A second major question is the demarcation problem: what distinguishes science from non-science? This is not merely academic — courts have had to decide whether intelligent design is science, and health regulators must judge which therapies count as evidence-based. Karl Popper's famous answer was falsifiability: a claim is scientific if it could in principle be shown false by evidence. Einstein's general relativity predicts the bending of starlight; astrology, by contrast, makes predictions vague enough to accommodate any outcome. Popper's criterion has been enormously influential, but critics note it struggles with well-established theories that are hard to falsify directly.
A third dimension is the structure of scientific explanation. When we explain why the sky is blue (Rayleigh scattering), or why a population of bacteria became resistant to antibiotics (natural selection), what are we actually doing? The covering-law model says an explanation deduces the phenomenon from a general law plus initial conditions. But explanations in biology, history, and social science often invoke mechanisms, functions, or narrative sequences instead — not universal laws. Philosophy of science tries to give a general account that captures all these cases.
Finally, philosophy of science examines how science changes over time. The history of science is not a smooth accumulation — it includes revolutions where entire frameworks are overthrown. Kuhn described science as normally proceeding within 'paradigms' (shared assumptions and exemplary problem-solutions) until anomalies accumulate and trigger a 'paradigm shift.' These shifts (Copernican revolution, quantum mechanics) are not just updates to existing knowledge; they change the very concepts through which scientists understand the world. Understanding this process is essential for understanding what scientific progress actually means.
Topics in reflective domains aren't scored by quiz answers. Read, reflect, and mark when you've thought it through.
This is a foundational topic with no prerequisites.
No prerequisites — this is a starting point.