SCIENCE & THE EXPLANATIONS

 According to Wikipedia Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Moreover the term Science is originally derived from a Latin word Scientia which gives the meaning knowledge, knowing, expertness or experience.

Simply science is the study of nature and behavior of natural things and the knowledge we gain about them.When we see about how philosophy relates with science,philosophy is also about a priori knowledge(if it exists).

While science is also about empirical knowledge.Then philosophy is about necessary truths(If they exist),while science too is about contingent facts.And philosophy is about normative truths while science is about descriptive facts.And also we can say that philosophy is the science of science. 

The first approach to science that we will examine is a revolutionary form of empiricism that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, flourished for a time, was transformed and moderated under the pressure of objections, and then slowly became extinct.

Begin of Science

Aristotle mentioned that Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, 6th century Ionian philosophers, were the first to investigate natural phenomena.But according to Wikipedia The earliest roots of science can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE.Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present.

How did the science begin to change the way people thought ?

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Scientific Explanation

Science is the study of the natural world through observation and experiment. A scientific explanation uses observations and measurements to explain something we see in the natural world. Scientific explanations should match the evidence and be logical, or they should at least match as much of the evidence as possible. In the philosophical literature on scientific explanation,the term "explanation" is used ambiguously. Most authors use it to apply to a linguistic entity composed of the explanans statements and the explanandum statement. Others use it to refer to the collection of facts consisting of the explanans-facts and the explanandum-fact. In most contexts this ambiguity is harmless and does not lead to any confusion. But we should be aware that it exists.

Deduction & Induction

As we will see, one influential philosophical account of explanation regards all bona fide scientific explanations as arguments. An argument is simply a set of statements, one of which is singled out as the conclusion of the argument. The remaining members of the set are premises. There may be one or more premises; no fixed number of premises is required. The premises provide support for the conclusion. All logically correct arguments fall into two types, deductive and inductive, and these types differ fundamentally from one another. For purposes of this chapter (and later chapters as well) we need a reasonably precise characterization of them. Four characteristics are important for our discussion.

Deduction

Deductive reasoning works from the more general to the more specific. Sometimes this is informally called a “top down” approach. We might begin with thinking up a theory about our topic of interest. We then narrow that down into more specific hypotheses that we can test. We narrow down even further when we collect observations to address the hypotheses. This ultimately leads us to be able to test the hypotheses with specific data a confirmation (or not) of our original theories.

Induction

Inductive reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. Informally, we sometimes call this a “bottom up” approach (please note that it’s “bottom up” and not “bottoms up” which is the kind of thing the bartender says to customers when he’s trying to close for the night!). In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or theories.

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Blog by Sanindu Sandamal.