124. Philosophy of Science

Philosophy of science is the philosophical study of the sciences, both with respect to scientific method and to the content of scientific theories and the nature of scientific claims more generally. It draws on ideas from epistemology and metaphysics (Knowledge and Reality), formal logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of probability, and theories of meaning. Questions of scientific method include the problem of induction, the nature of scientific observation, and the role of scientific explanation, along with the working interpretations under which theories can be subjected to experimental tests. They also include theory-change, whether by inter-theory reduction, unification, falsification, or revolutionary theory-change, and the norms that apply in each case. The content of scientific theories concerns what those theories say, and how they are to be interpreted, whether in realist, structuralist, functionalist, or instrumental terms, including the question of what laws really are, and how theories themselves should be defined.

The topic also includes the study of major historical schools in philosophy of science. The most important of these is logical positivism (later logical empiricism), which dominated philosophy of science in much of the last century, and which, as based on the writings of Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, was important to the history of analytic philosophy.