Philosophy of science Crossword Puzzle for Kids

Philosophy of science is the part of philosophy that studies sciences.

Philosophers who are interested in science study how knowledge is built up by scientists and what makes science different from other activities. No doubt, modern science has advanced knowledge in a wide range of fields. How has it done so? To tackle this issue, a number of other issues also have to be tackled.

What makes science distinct?

Some people like Thomas Henry Huxley think that in earlier times, science was nothing but organized common sense. However, during the 20th century, science produced many ideas which were nothing like common sense, like general relativity. It was then was clear that science really was something different from common sense, but what was it? That is called the demarcation problem.

The demarcation problem refers to the distinction between science and non-science like pseudoscience. Karl Popper called that the central question in the philosophy of science. No solution to the problem has had full agreement among philosophers; some of them think the problem is unsolvable or uninteresting.

The logical positivists tried to base science on observation. In their view, truth was achieved by logic and observation. Non-science was non-observational and meaningless.

Against that, Popper argued that the central property of science is falsifiability. All scientific claims can be proved false, at least in principle. If no such proof can be found despite sufficient effort, then the claim is likely true. Popper's ideas were applauded by many scientists like Peter Medawar. However, skeptics noticed that ideas were often not discarded when a prediction was refuted. The ideas were simply adjusted to take into account the new findings. It was clear from this that although falsifiability was important, it could not be a simple way to distinguish science from non-science.

Other approaches were tried. One idea was that science was a problem-solving process aimed at finding answers to questions. Of course, many other fields try to answer questions and solve problems. Another approach was to define science as the search for objective truth, but objectivity is very hard to define, and whether science really is objective is open to question.

Theories and observations

Both theory and observations are part of science, and they are tied together in a kind of cycle. A clear example was the prediction of Albert Einstein that a source of gravity (such as a star) would bend light passing nearby. An expedition was organised in 1919 to record the positions of stars around the Sun during a solar eclipse. It showed that the positions of the stars close to the Sun were changed slightly from their normal expected positions. The light passing close to the Sun was pulled towards the sun by gravitation.

That seemed to prove Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915. Many years later, the proof was shown to be wrong, but other observations (of time dilation) had showed that Einstein actually was right. Gravitational lensing proved that light was pulled towards the Sun.

The point is that the observation and the theory were connected. The observation would not have been made but for the theory, and then the observation was convincing evidence in favour of the theory. The theory had passed a critical test. Since then, many more tests have been made of Einstein's ideas, and all of them have been consistent with his theory.

According to common sense, science begins with observations: all scientific knowledge come from the facts of experience. Theories are produced by observation of these facts and are then tested by prediction.

Here is a schema of this idea of science that some philosophers call a naive conception of science:

Other ideas

Is there any scientific method at all? Paul Feyerabend argued that no description of scientific method could possibly encompass all the approaches and methods used by scientists. Feyerabend objected to prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would stifle and cramp scientific progress. Feyerabend claimed that "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."

Thomas Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the hypothesis being tested from the influence of the theory in which the observations are grounded. He argued that observations always rely on a specific paradigm, and it is not possible to evaluate competing paradigms independently. By "paradigm," he meant a consistent "portrait" of the world that involves no logical contradictions and is consistent with observations made from the paradigm's point of view. More than one such logically consistent construct can paint a usable likeness of the world, but there is no common ground from which to pit two against each other, theory against theory. Neither is a standard by which the other can be judged. Instead, the question is which "portrait" is judged by some set of people to promise the most useful in terms of scientific "puzzle solving."

For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes. The individual's choice between paradigms involves setting two or more "portraits" against the world and deciding which likeness is most promising. In the case of a general acceptance of one paradigm or another, Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists. Acceptance or rejection of some paradigm is, he argued, a social process as much as a logical process. Kuhn's position, however, is not one of relativism. According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift occurs when a number of observational anomalies (problems) in the old paradigm have made the new paradigm more useful. That is, the choice of a new paradigm is based on observations, even though those observations are made against the background of the old paradigm. A new paradigm is chosen because it does a better job of solving scientific problems than the old one.

The fact that observation is embedded in theory does not mean observations are irrelevant to science. Scientific understanding derives from observation, but the acceptance of scientific statements is dependent on the related theoretical paradigm as well as on observation. Of course, further testing may resolve differences of opinion.

Other websites

An introduction to the Philosophy of Science, aimed at beginners - Paul Newall.

Text adapted from the Simple English Wikipedia article “Philosophy of science” (revision 10531346, 2025-09-23), authors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.