What’s So Special About Science? Problems and Puzzles

Catalog description

Science is often taken to be a distinctly rational form of empirical inquiry. This course examines various questions concerning the nature and practice of science that arise from this widespread attitude. For example, scientific theories are often thought to be subject to empirical scrutiny in ways that other theories are not. To what extent is this belief well-founded? Is it rational to believe that our best scientific theories are even approximately true? What justifies the claim that different types of evidence lend varying degrees of support to a particular theory, or that a single piece of evidence supports one theory more than another? Similarly, it is often claimed that scientific theories provide us with "real" explanations of physical phenomena, whereas other theories aren't "genuinely explanatory." To what extent is this true? What exactly is a scientific explanation, and how is it different (if at all) from a mere prediction or mathematical derivation? Can false theories provide good explanations? Some familiarity with science would be helpful but is not required.