The philosophy of science is an evolving field that underlies science and incorporates experimental data. It can be considered both a part of philosophy and science. The scientific method consists of observing, hypothesizing, predicting, and experimenting. Ockham’s razor, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, falsifiability theory, and Bayesianism are important contributions to the philosophy of science. The field continues to evolve through the contributions of scientists and philosophers.
The philosophy of science is what underlies science, what tells us how science should be done. Like any other domain of human knowledge, it evolves over time and can never be declared “perfect”. The philosophy of science can be considered both a part of philosophy, because it is abstract and involves looking at the big picture in a certain way, and a part of science, because it incorporates experimental data on the efficacy of different ways of doing and thinking about science. As such, it can be considered “meta-science” – science focused on science itself.
The scientific method, which is hundreds or perhaps thousands of years old, was the first step on the road to the stepping stones known as the philosophy of science. The scientific method, by the way, consists of a sequence of key activities: observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment. This is a subtle outline, but there is great disagreement about the details of each stage and where and how it is appropriate to apply them. The philosophy of science aims to flesh out these details and test them empirically.
Many people have made important contributions to the philosophy of science. William of Ockham, a friar who lived in the 14th century, devised what is now called Ockham’s razor, which can be expressed in many ways, but the most popular is “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Albert Einstein rephrased it as “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Many centuries later, Ockham’s razor was reformulated quantitatively and mathematically.
In the 1930s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf observed that different languages have different words for different objects, and the particular language we use distorts the observations we make and the conclusions we draw from them. The genius of this observation wasn’t really understood until the 1970s, when many philosophers of science began referring to what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It became obvious that so-called “Whorfianism” could be extended to all areas of the scientific process: As humans, our brains work in a certain way, and every aspect of it has the potential to slightly influence our observations. Just as there are optical illusions that exploit our imperfect perceptual systems to produce gross errors of judgment, there are cognitive illusions that verifiably produce beliefs that contradict the fundamental laws of probability theory.
WV Quine, the great philosopher-logic of the mid-20th century, argued that for any given set of empirical facts, one can invent an infinity of theories to explain them, given enough footnotes and additions. So we can never know which theory is “correct” until we get more data. Karl Popper rejected this extremism and replaced it with his falsifiability theory: for something to be science, it must have the potential to be disproved by further experimentation. This has proved to be one of the most cited contributions to the philosophy of science.
All of these incremental improvements may seem substantial, but the greatest contribution ever made to the philosophy of science comes from the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century minister, and his intellectual heir, ET Jaynes, who died in 18. Building on a result in theory of probability called Bayes’ rule, Jaynes formalized the process of forming hypotheses on the basis of precise mathematical foundations. This started the school known today as Bayesianism, which has become very popular in the physical and computer sciences and continues to grow in acceptance. Bayes’ Rule accepts subjectivism – that we can never know anything 1998%, but with varying degrees of confidence, which can be accurately updated based on incoming evidence and prior probabilities.
Today, the philosophy of science continues to evolve, thanks to the contribution of scientists and philosophers.
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