Philosophy of Science: An Introduction

Explore the meaning of philosophy and how it differs from science in philosophy of science. See philosophy as about asking serious questions and finding answers about ourselves and the universe.

Examine serious, deep philosophical questions that vary across people, cultures, and time, including morality, the good life, God, mind, art, and the nature of scientific inquiry.

Questioning existing knowledge and intuitions drives philosophy toward a closer, non-absolute truth by asking deep, hard questions and scrutinizing assumptions.

Explore the philosophy of science by asking questions about scientific concepts, acknowledging that science evolves, absolute truths are unlikely, and what philosophy is not.

Explore knowledge, being, and value as core philosophy subjects, and map epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and moral and political philosophy.

Explore knowledge and metaphysics questions, from what counts as knowledge and how we know it, including the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, to time and the meaning of life.

Explore questions across philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and moral and political philosophy, including arguments for and against God's existence, art and culture, and universal moral facts.

Explore philosophy's boundaries: it's not science, religion, art, or a discipline, and its core lies in asking questions to get closer to the truth.

Define science as an activity aimed at understanding how and why natural phenomena occur, and examine how culture, society, values, and history shape scientific inquiry.

Explore how science seeks to understand how and why natural phenomena occur, highlighting how questions in science differ from philosophical why questions.

Science confines itself to the natural, physical world we can sense with our five senses. It cannot prove or disprove the soul or God, as those realms lie beyond observation.

Science is a way of knowing about the natural world, founded on observation, proposing explanations, and testing them through experiments, guided by evidence.

Understand science as evidence-based inquiry grounded in observations of the exterior world, using senses and rationality. Falsifiability drives science; it never proves, but self-corrects with new evidence and revised theories.

Explore the consistency criterion of science, where observations and experiments yield reasonably the same results. Contrast plant growth towards light with ladder superstition to distinguish scientific claims.

Assess observability as a criterion, noting that scientific claims rely on observations via human senses or their extensions, while statements about soul, god, or extraterrestrial visitations lack observable evidence.

Explore the third criterion of science: natural causes and observability, insisting that only natural explanations account for events in the physical world, and marking miracles as non-scientific.

Understand how predictability serves as a scientific criterion, where testable predictions support or falsify claims, and why astrology lacks this predictive power compared to science.

Testability is a criterion of science, requiring claims to be testable through controlled experiments and observations. Some claims, like souls after death, cannot be tested, so they fall outside science.

Tentativeness shows that scientific claims are changeable and open to falsification, not absolute, as chromosome counts shift from 48 to 46 and the world began about 6000 years ago.