Portal:Philosophy of science
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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.
- The implications of scientific methods and models, along with the technology that arises from scientific knowledge, for the larger society.
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A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with – a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave is perhaps the best known of his many allegories, metaphors, and parables. The allegory is told and interpreted at the beginning of Book 7 of Republic (514A–520A).
Anti-psychiatry • Determinism • Empiricism • Epistemology • Evolution • Free will • History of science • Holism • Ontology • Philosophy of biology • Philosophy of physics • Pseudoscience • Reductionism • Roman Catholicism and Science • Skepticism • Sociology of scientific knowledge • Vitalism
He coined the term critical rationalism to describe his theory, rejecting classical empiricism, and holding that scientific theories are universal in nature, and can only be tested indirectly, with reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings.
...that the philosophy of biology has matured greatly since the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s, the discovery of the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid in 1953, and more recent advances in genetic engineering.
...that Occam's razor argues the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory?
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