Science and Philosophy
This page is one of the explanatory pages for my website, http://www.CardinalKnowledge.org. The website is a work in progress, and each and every part of it is open for discussion. The comments to these explanatory pages are where this discussion is to take place.
Science is the newest of the four cardinal directions of the human knowledge. It formed over the nearly two hundred year period commonly known as the Scientific Revolution, starting with the 1543 works of Copernicus and Vesalius and roughly complete with Newton’s works at the end of 17th century. Until then, observations of nature were often performed by the philosophers or theologians who sought examples of their ideas and did not dare give experiment the power to cast doubt on human reasoning. Although scientific inquiry and method had been slowly evolving everywhere on Earth, with Euclid and Archimedes, Brahmagupta and Avicenna, it took all this time until the works of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the 17th century philosophers, to start defining what science is.
Philosophy is tightly coupled with science, since logical reasoning is extensively used in both, but the domain of philosophy are wider. It is a perfect tool to define science, to define its subject, its application and its role in the human society, to tell what is scientific knowledge, and what isn’t, to separate it from religion, from pseudoscience, from metaphysics, from philosophy itself. The philosophies of science seem to have absorbed the essence of what they describe and replace each other just like the scientific theories do, each new definition correcting the omissions and oversights of the previous one. The original competing philosophies of Empiricism and Rationalism, created at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, fought and evolved, sprouting various offshoots until they were integrated by Hume, Kant, and even moreso Pierce, whose Pragmatism made possible Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism. Critical Rationalism is the philosophy of science that appears to have successfully fought off Scientific Realism and, so far, is the fittest survivor of this process of natural selection, despite continuous attacks of many major and minor philosophies. I wrote a little about each of these four philosophies.