What is "philosophy of science"

n. 1 (context philosophy uncountable English) The study of the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, including such questions as what distinguishes science from non-science, what are the aims of science, or what is a successful scientific explanation of a phenomenon. 2 (context philosophy countable English) A particular theory within the former.

Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth.

There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences (such as biology or physics). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

While philosophical thought pertaining to science dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in the middle of the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivism movement, which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements' meaningfulness and objectively assessing them. Thomas Kuhn's landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead arguing that any progress is relative to a " paradigm," the set of questions, concepts, and practices that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period.

Subsequently, the coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became prominent due to W. V. Quine and others. Some thinkers such as Stephen Jay Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) in particular, argue that there is no such thing as the " scientific method", so all approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones. Another approach to thinking about science involves studying how knowledge is created from a sociological perspective, an approach represented by scholars like David Bloor and Barry Barnes. Finally, a tradition in continental philosophy approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human experience.

Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the nature of time raised by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of economics for public policy. A central theme is whether one scientific discipline can be reduced to the terms of another. That is, can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology? The general questions of philosophy of science also arise with greater specificity in some particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics. The question of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, of psychology, and of the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or are inevitably shaped by values and by social relations.

Philosophy of Science is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association. The journal contains essays, discussion articles, and book reviews in the field of the philosophy of science. The first issue of Philosophy of Science appeared in January 1934, in which editor William Malisoff sought papers ranging from studies on "the analysis of meaning, definition, symbolism," in scientific theories to those on "the nature and formulation of theoretical principles" and "in the function and significance of science within various contexts."

Past editors have included William Malisoff, C. West Churchman, Richard Rudner, Kenneth Shaffner, Robert E. Butts, Merrilee Salmon, Philip Kitcher, Noretta Koertge, Michael Dickson, and Jeffrey A. Barrett.