The right of Dean Rickles to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

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Preface

[N]o science is possible without a philosophical background.

Rolf Hagedorn

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.

Daniel Dennett

Science and Philosophy must supplement each other, urge each other forward. Without science, philosophy is null; without philosophy, science is blind.

Antoine Augustin Cournot

Despite these grand proclamations of a necessary union between science and philosophy, philosophy books have an unfortunate tendency to be placed near the “New Age,” “Spiritualism,” and “Mysticism” shelves of book sellers, far away from the proud, upstanding science books. Yet philosophers of science are usually “scientist-friendly” (many having trained as scientists before “the switch”), though they might view scientists as somewhat naive in their views of how science actually works. Scientists friendly to philosophers are, these days at least, the exception rather than the rule: now, the two subjects, philosophy of science and science itself, are viewed more in opposition than alignment – one can find countless videos on YouTube of Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Lawrence Krauss and others bashing philosophy and philosophers; in his last book, the late Stephen Hawking went so far as to say that “philosophy is dead,” since it’s so out of touch with scientific developments. Ouch … This was not always the case, and there are in fact signs that things are changing, with new science–philosophy collaborations and some scientists actively encouraging a dialogue with philosophers.

What is philosophy of science? To some extent it is the subject that attempts to provide an answer to the question “what is science?” Philosophy of science puts science itself under the microscope. This book will explain what this looks like. At a simplistic level, science asks why something in the world is so: what makes it go? Philosophy of science then asks what makes science go: how are its claims justified? How, if at all, are its claims distinct from other claims about the world? How is it that the claims it makes about the world can be revised if, as is often suggested, it is supposed to provide objectively true descriptions? Can its claims really be said to map onto the real world at all? Each of these questions roughly corresponds to the topics covered in the three main chapters of this book (chapters 2–4) – we begin with a broad overview (chapter 1). Each chapter concludes with a brief summary of key concepts followed by an annotated selection of readings.

This book is written for the absolute beginner with no previous exposure to philosophy of science, or science for that matter, to prepare them for more in-depth study. This is, then, intended to be more a companion to one of the many other standard textbooks rather than a standalone textbook. It aims to present concisely and in a very simple fashion the key questions and problems defining the subject of philosophy of science, describing also how it has developed as a field and how it links up to broader issues in philosophy.

References

Cournot, A. A., Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances et sur les Caractères de la Critique Philosophique (Hachette, 1851).

Dennett, D., Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Hagedorn, R., “What Happened to Our Elementary Particles?” In C. Enz and J. Mehra (eds.), Physical Reality and Mathematical Description (Reidel, 1974), pp. 100–10.