The 'philosophy of science' is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, including the formal sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. In this respect, the philosophy of science is closely related to epistemology and the philosophy of language. Note that issues of scientific ethics are not usually considered to be part of the philosophy of science; they are studied in such fields as bioethics and science studies. In particular, the philosophy of science considers the following topics: the character and the development of concepts and terms, propositions and hypotheses, arguments and conclusions, as they function in science; the manner in which science explains natural phenomena and predicts natural occurrences; the types of reasoning that are used to arrive at scientific conclusions; the formulation, scope, and limits of scientific method; the means that should be used for determining when scientific information has adequate objective support; and the implications of scientific methods and models, along with the technology that arises from scientific knowledge for the larger society. Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No wholly random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur, according to this philosophy. The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. The concept of determinism is extensively used in chaos theory, used to predict the results of seemingly-random events such as rolling a die. However, determinism is a classical concept and cannot be used in new contextual frameworks such as in quantum mechanics. Determinism presupposes the Cartesian partition that quantum mechanics does not encompass "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." | | Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American intellectual, most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR). In SSR, he presented the idea that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts", in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions". 
| Here are some tasks you can do: - Requests: Science of science, Ethnoscience, Blind posits theory, Cognition theory, Epistemic support, Paul Durbin, Larry Hickman, Philosophy of astronomy, More...
- Merge: Identity (philosophy) ← Identity and change, Platonic epistemology ← Platonic doctrine of recollection, Causality (split), Objectivity (philosophy) ← Objectivity (science)
- Cleanup: Analytic-synthetic distinction, Causality, Coherentism, Constructivist epistemology, Contextualism, Existence, Existentialism, Philosophy of science, Proposition, Relativism, Substance theory, Universal (metaphysics), William Whewell
- Expand: Ontology, Pierre Duhem, Philosophy of mathematics education, Philosophy of probability, Physical body, Positivism, Unobservables
- Stubs: Berlin Circle (philosophy), Biological determinism, Boundary-work, Cartesian anxiety, Causal chain, Chaos argument, Clockmaker hypothesis, Conceptual definition, Condition of possibility, Deductive-nomological, Descriptive science, More...
- NPOV: Reality, David Stove
- Other: Science collaboration of the month: Carbon • More mathematical and natural sciences, or philosophy pages needing attention...
| |
.png)
