The four viewpoints on the philosophy of science

One view is that the philosophy of science is the formulation of worldviews that are consistent with, and in some sense based on, important scientific theories. On this view, it is the task of the philosopher of science to elaborate the broader implications of science. This may take the form of speculation about ontological categories to be used in speaking about “beingas-such”. Thus Alfred North Whitehead urged that recent developments in physics require that the categories ‘substance’ and ‘attribute’ be replaced by the categories ‘process’ and ‘influence’.2 Or it may take the form of pronouncements about the implications of scientific theories for the evaluation of human behaviour, as in Social Darwinism and the theory of ethical relativity. The present study is not concerned with “philosophy of science” in this sense.


A second view is that the philosophy of science is an exposition of the presuppositions and predispositions of scientists. The philosopher of science may point out that scientists presuppose that nature is not capricious, and that there exist in nature regularities of sufficiently low complexity to be accessible to the investigator. In addition, he may uncover the preferences of scientists for deterministic rather than statistical laws, or for mechanistic rather than teleological explanations. This view tends to assimilate philosophy of science to sociology.

A third view is that the philosophy of science is a discipline in which the concepts and theories of the sciences are analysed and clarified. This is not a matter of giving a semi-popular exposition of the latest theories. It is, rather, a matter of becoming clear about the meaning of such terms as ‘particle’, ‘wave’, ‘potential’, and ‘complex’ in their scientific usage.

But as Gilbert Ryle has pointed out, there is something pretentious about this view of the philosophy of science—as if the scientist needed the philosopher of science to explain to him the meanings of scientific concepts.3 There would seem to be two possibilities. Either the scientist does understand a concept that he uses, in which case no clarification is required. Or he does not, in which case he must inquire into the relations of that concept to other concepts and to operations of measurement. Such an inquiry is a typical scientific activity. No one would claim that each time a scientist conducts such an inquiry he is practising philosophy of science. At the very least, we must conclude that not every analysis of scientific concepts qualifies as philosophy of science. And yet it may be that certain types of conceptual analysis should be classified as part of the philosophy of science. This question will be left open, pending consideration of a fourth view of the philosophy of science.

A fourth view is that philosophy of science is a second-order criteriology. The philosopher of science seeks answers to such questions as: . What characteristics distinguish scientific inquiry from other types of investigation? . What procedures should scientists follow in investigating nature? . What conditions must be satisfied for a scientific explanation to be correct? . What is the cognitive status of scientific laws and principles?


Reference: The introduction of the book in the following link:

https://philosophy-of-sciences.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-historical-introduction-to-philosophy.html