Course Objectives

• With this course, students will be able to recognize the questions

about science and how they differ from scientific questions.
• It provides a clear understanding of what is distinctive about science,
i.e., how it differs from other human enterprises regarding
knowledge, methods, implications, and values.
• It enables students to understand how philosophy scrutinizes
scientific theories and explanations in their attempt to unveil the
causality of phenomena.
• It also aims to create an awareness among students about how
science relates to philosophy and further make sense of the
philosophical issues in different branches of science.
Questions driving the course
• What is it to call something a science?
• How does scientific reasoning work?
• What is the nature of scientific explanation?
• How do scientific theories change over time?
• Are scientific theories true?
• Is science value-free?
What is science
Systematic observation of natural events and conditions in order to
1. discover facts about them and to formulate laws and principles
based on these facts.
2. the organized body of knowledge that is derived from such
observations and that can be verified or tested by further investigation
3. any specific branch of this general body of knowledge, such as
biology, physics, geology, or astronomy.
(Academic Press Dictionary of Science & Technology)
What is science?

Science is derived from facts and the facts are presumed to be claims
about the world that can be directly established by a careful,
unprejudiced use of the senses (Chalmers, 1999)
Science
• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts- Richard Feynman

• A carpenter, a school teacher, and scientist were traveling by train

through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window
of the train. "Aha," said the carpenter with a smile, "I see that
Scottish sheep are black." "Hmm," said the school teacher, "You mean
that some Scottish sheep are black." "No," said the scientist glumly,
"All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that
at least one side of that one sheep is black."
Philosophical perspective
• What exists?

• What is knowledge and how do we gain knowledge?

• What is right and good?

• What is beautiful?
Metaphysics- Ontology
• The study of what exists in general

• What properties are essential rather than merely accidental? When

does an object go out of existence as opposed to changing

• Are all nouns for example, electron, time, energy, truth, happiness,
God are entities?

• In computer and information science, it is more of a taxonomical

framework of knowledge representation- Medical, Food ontology
Ontological varieties
• Ontological commitment- The existence of stuff which is a precondition for
a theory to operate

• Ontological materialism- material parts are more real for example

particles, energy etc. Thomas Hobbes

• Ontological idealism- immaterial more important for example mind,

George Berkeley

• Material Dualism- Some are physical or material and some are non physical
and non material
Realism
• Platonic realism- Forms or concepts or ideas are only thing real

• Commonsense or Naïve realism- Sense provides direct awareness

• Sophisticated realism- It entails Primary qualities such as time, space, form,

mass, energy, extension, movement Secondary such as color, smell, taste,
heat, sound etc. and Tertiary- good, bad, beautiful etc. (Locke, Descartes)

• Critical realism- All qualities including the primary qualities come to us

through our experience or thoughts. Hence nothing we know of the world
is independent of us. (Kant)
Scientific realism
• Metaphysical realism- objects are independent of mind

• Entity Realism- particles are real

• Structural realism- theories are real

• Epistemic realism- what one knows is independent of mind

Epistemology
• What is knowledge?

• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?

• What are its sources?

• What is its structure and limits?

Knowledge and belief
• Acquaintance or Personal knowledge- I know Ram

• Ability or Procedural knowledge- I know how to operate a machine

• Propositional knowledge- I know sparrows are birds

• Beliefs can be true, accidentally true, partially true or false

Tripartite theory of knowledge
• Justified True Belief- The three conditions which must be satisfied for
one to possess knowledge are, belief, truth and justification

• One needs to believe without which one cannot know. No matter

how sincere a belief may be, it cannot be knowledge if it is not true.
Finally one must have a good reasons for believing rather than
guesses. In essence, knowledge is “justified true beliefs”

• The proposition- ‘to know p’ is knowledge if a) you believe that p b)

proposition p is true and c) you believe that p is justified
Is justified true beliefs knowledge?
Suppose I look at the clock on the wall and thereby form the belief that
it is 15:00, and suppose also that it really is 15:00. I have a justified true
belief, so according to the JTB analysis I know that it is 15:00.

But now suppose that the clock stopped at 15:00 yesterday, and only
tells the right time for one minute each day. It is only by chance that my
justified belief is true, and so it is not knowledge
Edmund Gettier (1963)
Types of proposition and knowledge
• Analytic- if it is true or false on the basis of meaning of words for example
‘square has four sides’

• Synthetic- if true or false by virtue of the way the world is for example ‘ripe
mangos taste sweet’

• A priori knowledge (or concept) if one does not require a sense perception
to know a proposition to be true for example ‘bachelors are unmarried’

• A posteriori knowledge when propositions that requires experience for

example, ‘snow is white’
Plato (428-347 BCE)
• Academy at Athens- Dialectic (Closed in 529 CE)

• Forms are eternal or Form theory

• Matter theory- Five elements and five three dimensional solids

• Cosmology- Geocentric with heavenly bodies revolving in circles

Plato’s natural philosophy
• “Our universe contains an indeterminate number of things, which,
although distinct and different from one an share a considerable
number of characteristics. It is the recognition of this community that
leads Plato’s Socrates to hypothesize the existence of intelligible
realities separated from sensible things, in which the sensible things
participate. Since the intelligible reality does not change, and is not
subject either to generation or to corruption, it exists in itself, i.e.,
independently of other things; it should therefore be considered not
as an effect, but as the cause of its own being. These realities are
defined as Forms (eidE).” (Brisson, 2012, 231-14).
Plato
Forms are uncreated, eternal, incorporeal, and changeless. We can
know them only by thought and reason; and because they are eternal
and unchanging, we also can have knowledge about them, whereas we
can have only opinion about the multiplicity of changeable physical
objects and living creatures that we perceive by our senses.

What we learned about the physical world classifies as opinion, in

contrast to the true knowledge that we obtained when we applied our
reason to the eternal, unchanging forms that had served as the models
for their material counterparts. Thus did he stress reasoned, abstract
analysis, rather than observation and reliance on the senses.
• Plato explains how he (Demiurge) made the body of the world from
four primary bodies, fire, air, water, and earth, and explains that these
four elements are ultimately composed of two triangles, the right-
angled scalene triangle and the equilateral triangle. From these two
triangles, the Demiurge shapes four three-dimensional geometric
figures, each of which forms one of the primary elements: the
tetrahedron produces fire; the octahedron yields air; the icosahedron
water; and the cube forms earth.
Platonic Solid
• Water

• Aether

• Air

• Earth

• Fire
Aristotle
• 200 treatises of which 46 (31) survive- Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic,
Mathematics, Biology, Medicine, Dance, Theatre, The Complete Works of
Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation

• Controversies about its originality in late 19th century: Theophrastus to

Neleus Scepsis: Rediscovered in 1st BCE and Andronicus of Rhodes edited
them

• Lectures or Working Drafts

• Lyceum- Peripatetic: Argued forms are intrinsic to objects except in art,

Nutritive/vegetative and Rational soul
Aristotle’s cosmos (McClellan and Dorn, 2006)
Founder of Biology
• Aristotle describes the internal parts of 110 animals, of which he may have dissected as
many as forty-nine, perhaps even an elephant

• For example, he dissected eye of a chick, the eye of a mole, the cochlea of the inner ear

• “With the common hen after three days and three nights there is the first indication of
the embryo; with larger birds the interval being longer, with smaller birds shorter.
Meanwhile the yoke comes into being, rising towards the sharp end, where the primal
element of the egg is situated and where the egg gets hatched; and the heart appears,
like a speck of blood, in the white of the egg. This point beats and moves as though
endowed with life, and from it, as it grows, two vein ducts with blood in them trend in a
convoluted course towards each of the two circumjacent integuments; and a membrane
carrying bloody fibres now envelops the white, leading off from the veinducts. A little
afterwards the body is differentiated, at first very small and white.
Founder of Logic
• Organon: Tool or instrument comprising six works

• Categories, which treats of terms, On Interpretation, concerned with

propositions; Topics, a study of non-demonstrative reasoning (how to conduct a
good argument), Sophistical Refutations, describes different kinds of fallacies and
how to resolve them.

• Prior analytics contains syllogism and Posterior analytics giving his scientific
method using mathematical model

• In Poetics, provides categories of drama: Tragedy, Comedy, Epic, and Lyric. In

Tragedy he distinguished six elements: plot, character, thought, diction, song, and
spectacle.
Aristotle: Different kind of knowledge
• Three kind: Productive, Practical and theoretical sciences

• Productive: concerned with making useful objects; Practical concerned

with human conduct

• Theoretical: Metaphysics or theology dealing with unchangeable;

Mathematics which also dealing with unchangeable but without separate
existence (includes Optics, harmonics and astronomy)

• Physics or natural philosophy dealing with terrestrial and extra terrestrial

Causes: Matter and Form
• Cause- Material, Formal, Efficient and Final

• Matter a passive principle and form an active principle

• Changes: Substantial (fire reducing wood to ash), qualitative (color of

leaf changing), change of quantity (grows or diminishes while
retaining identity) and change of place

• God: Teleological cause

Theory of Aristotle and Hippocrates
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• Trinity college, Political career (1581-1617) Impeachment 1621

• Advancement of Learning-1605, Cogitata et visa- 1607

• Human mind as Crooked mirror

• Novum Organum Scientiarum- 1620

Bacon’s Idols
• Idols of the tribe- senses, discerning order, wishful thinking,
premature judgment

• Idols of the cave- education, experience, gender, customs etc.

• Idols of the market place- distortion through communication,

languages

• Idols of the theatre- philosophies such as scholastic, superstitious etc.

Galileo (1564-1642)
• Great World System, The Assayer, Two New Sciences- ‘The Grand
Book of Nature is written in Mathematics’

• Hypothetico Methodology- Intuition based on observation of

phenomena, Mathematical law to be discerned that correlates,
Deduction for generalization and experiment for verification

• Abstraction and idealization as part of experiments

• Mathematical physics
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the
universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.
But this book cannot be understood unless one first
learns to comprehend the language and read the
letters in which it is composed. It is written in the
language of mathematics, and its characters are
triangles, circles, and other geometric figures
without which it is humanly impossible to
understand a single word of it; without these, one
wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
Galileo in Assayer
Galileo and Scientific method
• Nature is fundamentally mathematical and we can have insight into these
mathematical relation by refining our sensory experiences

• Through intuition, we isolate in a specific phenomena certain elements, which

are translated into a quantitative form and endeavor to discover some
mathematical laws or formulae which will correlate these elements in a
systematic manner

• Deduction made from this law holds that similar instances of phenomena must
be true and it can be verified by experiments

• Senses can be fallible, separate the relative from absolute, uncover the hidden
order within appearances
Galileo
• Science aims at understanding how nature acts under ideal
conditions- Reduction

• Mathematical and empirical reasoning will show how the world

behaves and not necessarily why

• Reason cannot anticipate how the physical world must be, but must
be prepared to be surprised what empirical world reveals

• The pendulum, Inclined plane and acceleration, Projectile motion

Galileo and Experiment
• Limited experiments can provide valid knowledge

• Phenomenon of fall is accelerated to mathematical relation for the

change in motion that is validated through experiments

• Role of experiments is for elimination of false hypothesis and

confirmation of true than discovery of new hypothesis

• Mental experiment played an important part in his method

British Empiricist: John Locke (1632-1704)
• Two Treatise of Government- 1689 Liberty, Property, Self etc.

• An Essay concerning Human Understanding 1690- Mind as tableau rasa

All of our knowledge is through experience

• Ideas include concrete sensory images, abstract intellectual concepts and

everything in between.

• Sensation and reflection- Senses for external such as seeing, hearing etc.
and reflection for internal operation of mind for example memory,
imagination, desire, doubt, choice
Simple Ideas
• Ideas we get from single sense such as seeing

• Ideas we get from multiple sense for example shape and size

• Ideas from reflection such as doubting

• Ideas from combination of reflection and senses for example unity

John Locke
• Primary qualities such as shape, solidity, extension, weight etc. are
inherent and are possessed by the object

• Secondary qualities for example, color, taste, temperature etc. which

varies for example such qualities are produced through interaction
with eyes, smell etc.

• All our complex ideas can be broken down to simple ideas- Simple
idea for example yellow, father etc. while complex ideas are lemon,
humanity or glass of orange juice etc.
Complex Ideas- combination, comparison and
abstraction
• Modes- ideas which do not exist in themselves for example number
three, infinity or quality etc.

• Substances for example army of men etc.

• Relations such as father, bigger, cause and effect

• Abstract general for example, man,

George Berkeley (1685-1753)
• A treatise concerning the principles of Human Knowledge 1710- Idealism
and Immaterialism

• Everything that exists is either a mind or depends upon a mind for its
existence

• There are no material substances, finite mental substances and infinite

mental substances or God- Primary qualities depend on mind just as much
as secondary qualities.

• To be is to be perceived
David Hume 1711-1776 Phenomenalism
• All knowledge is from appearances which come to us through
perceptions

• Perceptions can be impressions and ideas for example impressions

can be sensation, emotion etc. and ideas such as reasoning, thinking

• An idea is the experience we have in the absence of an object and all

ideas are derived from impressions

• An impression is the experience we have in the presence of object

David Hume
• Laws of association- The principles that binds impression and ideas
together to produce complex mental state of human, a gentle force
that does not take our permission, will or even consciousness

• Resemblance- a pictures that leads us to original

• Contiguity in time and space- an event or building takes us to the

place and time

• Causation- For example wound and pain

 Rationalism
• Knowledge of a particular subject matter is underwritten by intuition
and deductive reasoning than by experience of that subject matter

• Knowledge of a particular subject matter is innate- a’ priori and

rational nature

• Concepts that constitute our ability to think of a subject matter are

innate

• Rationalists agree to at least one and Empiricist reject all of them

Rationalism- Descartes
• Age of Reason- 17th century, Introduction of mathematical models
into philosophy- Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza

• R Descartes was born in 1596- Initial studies in Jesuit college and

served army.

• Had Beekman's influence and one of his early work was Rules for the
direction of Mind

• In 1630 moved to Amsterdam- Optics, Meteorology and ‘The World’

Descartes's contribution
• Discourse on Method (1637)

• Meditation (1639-): analytic and synthetic

• Principles of Physics-vacuum, infinitely divisible

• Court of Queen Christina Sweden

SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I
had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true,
and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles
was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the
necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the
opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of
building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and
abiding superstructure in the sciences.
Descartes's contribution
• Discourse on Method (1637) Meditation (1639-)

• Foundationalist, Method of doubt- I exist and I am a thinking thing

• Attribute of body is extension that of mind is thinking

• Body conceived as extension is passive and cannot move itself; we must,

therefore God as the first cause of motion in the world. He is the mover.
Descartes holds that God has given the world a certain amount of motion:
motion is constant. Since God is immutable, all changes in the world of
bodies must follow constant rules, or laws of nature.
This proof for the existence of God is not the ontological proof of Anselm, but a causal proof, which begins
with the idea of a perfect being existing in my mind. It is not argued that such a being exists merely
because we have a concept of him, but, rather, that from the idea of such a being we can necessarily infer
the existence of that being as the cause of the idea.

The argument differs from the ontological proof in two respects: (1) its starting point is not the concept of
God as a formal essence, but the actual existing idea of God in the mind of a man;

(2) it proceeds by causal inference from the idea of God to God himself and not, as in the case of the
ontological argument, by strict formal implication from the essence of God to his existence

Doubt implies a standard of truth, imperfection a standard of perfection. Again, I could not have been the
cause of my own existence; for I have an idea of perfection, and if I had created myself, I should have made
myself perfect, and, moreover, I should be able to preserve myself, which is not the case. If my parents had
created me, they could also preserve me, which is impossible.
Descartes
• Cartesian dualism- Mind is non-extended thinking while Body is
extended and non-thinking, it divided existence into two kind of
things

• Ontological argument- Mind and a perfect being that exists, God

• Religion motivation, to argue mind exists beyond body

• Scientific motivation, to counter teleological purpose with

mechanistic ideas
Descartes- Nature of ideas
• Ideas are of three type

• Fabricated which one can invent and control-internal content can be

changed

• Adventious ideas which are external that cannot be controlled or set aside
for example sensation due to external object- internal content cannot be
changed

• Innate- The idea of God, the mind, mathematical truth which exist in mind
potentially as tendencies which are then actualized
Leibniz (1646-1716): Rationalism
• Calculus, Binary system etc. - Ideas and thoughts

• Ideas can exist without mind being aware. Thoughts are formed when
confronted with sensory experience

• Necessary and Contingent truths- Necessary when opposite is not

possible while contingent when opposite is possible

• Change, duration, pleasure, unity etc.- Marble veins

Chomsky-rationalism
• Acquisition of local language regardless of child’s intelligence and variation
in experience

• Acquisition is normally fast and follows a characteristic path despite

variations in their particularities

• Knowledge child acquires outstrips theories linguists have been able to

construct

• Children are able to acquire knowledge of language that exceeds adult’s

Empiricist’s response to Chomsky
• Role of experience and innateness

• How small children and those with abnormal development lack language
ability? Knowledge acquisition is innate psychological state and capacity

• Exaggerated claims by rationalist- is it same as propositional knowledge?

• Knowledge of language is part of human nature and not rational nature

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
• Identified God with Nature- Not beyond Nature

• Logical Universe- Mind and matter are different forms of reality

• Inadequate idea- through sensation, perceptual data and are

qualitative and incoherent

• Adequate idea involves reason, intellect

Forms of dispute- Empiricism and Rationalism
• There is innate knowledge and without prior categories and principles supplied
by reason, we cannot organize and interpret sense experience.

• Poverty of stimulus or poverty of evidence- knowledge about the subject matter

could not have been acquired through sense experience and hence empiricism is
overruled. For example 2+2 = 4 cannot be explained by appeal to experience

• Subject matter of Ethics in which rationalists appeal to innate knowledge

• Empiricist claim, such knowledge can be obtained through experience for

example the first through induction or through operation of mind and second in
its absence among young
Immanuel Kant’s Synthesis
• Critique of Pure Reason 1781- All our knowledge begins with
experience but not all arises out of experience

• Mind imposes principles upon experience to generate knowledge

• Sensation without conception is blind and Conception without

sensation is void

• Every phenomenon has a cause, is a synthetic apriori statement

Newton (1642-1727)
• Trinity College Cambridge 1661- developed laws in 1665 vacation

• Dispersion, 1672- Light made of different colors

• Theology and Alchemy- 1670s and early 80s

• Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy- published by Royal

Society London in 1687 with support from Edmond Halley
Newton- University to Government
• Moved in 1696 to London as Chief Warden Mint

• Becomes President of Royal Society in 1703

• Scientific method

• Calculus- controversy with Leibniz

Optiks 1704
• Proof by experiment- color a physical property of light

• Seven colors of rainbow correspond to seven notes of music

• Particle theory of light- Hooke’s disagreement

• Series of queries- method of science, electricity, magnetism, cause of

gravity, ethical conduct of human etc.
Newton (1642-1727)
• Mathematical principles of natural philosophy 1687

• Metaphysical problems to empirical projects- Time, Space, Force

• Whatever not deduced from the phenomena are to be called

hypothesis and Hypothesis non fingo

• Hypothesis have no role in experimental philosophy, though he

admits its use for entities without independent experimental support
Newton: Experimental Philosophy
• Proposition deduced from phenomena are made general by induction

• Proof by experiment- His passing of light through a prism led him to argue
its proof of mixture of rays than eliminate the hypothesis of light as pulse
propagated in a medium

• Knowledge of causes and certainty can be obtained- Moral and practical

certainty than meta physical certainty

• Leibniz claimed that the inverse square law is not deduced from the
phenomena but more of a hypothesis, or explanatory cause
Hypothetic deductive Method
• Observation and description of a phenomena or group of phenomena

• Formulation of hypothesis to explain the phenomena for example

mathematical relation- Measurable

• Use of hypothesis to predict existence of other phenomena for

example predict quantitatively result of new observation

• Performance of experimental tests by other researchers

Logical Positivism
• Ontological reductionism or Physicalism -What is meaningful is what is
verifiable

• Meta physical statements are not verifiable and hence forbidden- their role
in clarifying meaning and logical relationship

• Analytical knowledge sources- Logic, Mathematics, empirical knowledge

provided by Science

• Synthetic apriori has no meaning- Hume's challenge for inductive logic

Popper’s falsification approach
• Born in Vienna, 1902, studied at LSE

• Association with Logical Positivist, Moved to New Zealand during war

• Open society and its enemy- 1945, Poverty of Historicism

• Moved to LSE in 1946, Logic of Scientific Discovery

Falsification theory of Popper
• We can obtain confirmation and verification for every theory

• Confirmation should count if only they are risky prediction

• A theory which is not refutable is not scientific

• Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it. Some

genuinely testable theories when found false are held by admirers by
using ad hoc, auxiliary assumptions or reinterepreting the theory in
an attempt to rescue it- Conventionalist twist
Critical Rationalism
• Scientific method is continuous Conjecture and Refutation

• Implication- all knowledge is conjectural or hypothetical

• The best theory at any point is of highest empirical content that has
withstood attempts of experimental refutation

• Verisimilitude
Limitations of Poppers conception
• The evidence may be at fault than the theory.

• In early stage, theory falsified for inaccurate data

• Inefficient evidences

• Degree of falsification
Realism and antirealism
• What is realism

• Scientific realism: a true description of the world, that often succeeds

• Antirealism: Empirical adequacy, not truth is the aim (how to

interpret scientific enterprise) of scientific theorizing

• Constructivism
Scientific realism and anti realism
• No miracle argument

• Kinetic theory of gases

• Observable and unobservable distinction

• Under-determination
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
• Early Physics Career at Harvard- ‘Copernican Revolution’-1957, ‘The
Essential Tension’-1959

• ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolution’-1962

• Moves to Princeton in 196- ‘The Blackbody Theory and Quantum

Discontinuity’-1978

• Moves to MIT in 1983

Kuhn’s analysis of scientific change
• Normal and Revolutionary Phases

• Normal science puzzle solving- worldview and form of life

• Progress is discernable-disciplinary matrix or paradigm

• Anomalies and Crisis, Paradigm overthrow- accuracy, consistency,

simplicity, scope, fruitfulness
Kuhn’s analysis
• Galileo and Aristotelian motion- Pendulum or constrained motion

• Chemistry- Water and alcohol compound or solution

• Ptolemy’s school of thought and Copernican revolution

• Newton and Einstein's framework

Kuhn’s theory- Implications
• Incommensurability Taxonomic and Methodological- Mass, Planet etc.

• Science does not accumulate knowledge but moves from one

inadequate framework to another- goal is not truth

• Theory dependence of observation- wind, pressure, gas, chalk etc.

• Communication across social barriers- Trading Zone, Boundary Object

Criticism
• Scientific changes are far more common than Kuhn dramatizes

• Structure of DNA

• Discontinuity is bound by continuity- for example a thread

• Irrationalism