What is science, and how does it work? Are scientific theories certain, or can they change with the evidence? These are the kinds of questions that this audiobook asks. People associate science with a body of knowledge, about DNA or the planet Jupiter or whatever it might be. But science is more a way of thinking about things, than it is a body of knowledge. It’s a way of testing our beliefs, and evaluating them against the evidence. It has roots deep in ancient history, but our understanding of it has evolved dramatically over the centuries. This is one of a number of things that this audiobook makes clear.
This audiobook definitely examines these issues. But its focus is more chronological than anything else. That is to say, it doesn’t just examine the philosophy of science – or “how we know what we know” – but it also gives the history of how our beliefs on this subject have changed. They start in antiquity, and go almost to the present day. They talk about Aristotle’s codification of logic, and his ringing endorsement of the value of evidence. But they also examine what later thinkers had to say about this subject.
René Descartes
One of the most influential debates on this subject is called the “rationalism-empiricism” debate. This is basically a debate about the most reliable foundation of human knowledge. On the one side were the rationalists (like René Descartes), who argued that only reason can be a reliable basis for human knowledge. On the other side were the empiricists (like Francis Bacon), who argued that only data and the evidence of one’s senses are reliable. Or rather, this is how these sides are often represented. In practice, neither side was quite as extreme as its critics have made it out to be. The rationalists made concessions to empirical evidence, and the empiricists made concessions to logic and reason. This is one of the points that this audiobook makes – that they agreed with each other somewhat more often than is sometimes supposed. (Although their disagreements were still quite substantial, as this audiobook makes clear.)
Francis Bacon
The rationalism-empiricism debate might seem a bit silly from a modern perspective. And for the two extreme ends of the spectrum, it often was silly. But there were some important scientific issues at stake in this debate. How much should we trust data, and how much should we trust the tools used to analyze it? There are times when the data available is unreliable, has been gathered in a suspicious way, or has just been made up wholesale. There are times when using the data is overgeneralized, and applied to populations that were no part of the sample – a problem with the way that the data is analyzed. These issues are covered in statistics classes, which try to sort them out appropriately. But they are also covered in science classes, and in “philosophy of science” classes. These are some of the issues at stake in these debates.
David Hume
They quote many philosophers on this subject, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant. But they also quote from scientists, such as Sir Isaac Newton – possibly the greatest scientist of them all, as Albert Einstein attested. This is because this debate is interdisciplinary, at least from a modern perspective. It involved scientists, philosophers, and people in both categories. At this time, the natural sciences were known as “natural philosophy,” so they were all considered to be part of the same discipline. To a large extent, they are still related today – even if these sciences have since split off into separate disciplines, such as biology and astronomy.
Immanuel Kant
I could go on more about this subject, but I don’t want this blog post to get too long. Suffice it to say that this is a good introduction to this subject, and shows you how our ideas on this subject have changed. It gives you many different perspectives on how science works – and rather than pronouncing one of them as “superior,” it allows you to choose for yourself about which one is best.
If you liked this post, you might also like:
Part of an audiobook series
Science & Discovery
Dimensions of Scientific Thought
Others to be covered later
See also the audiobook series
The Giants of Philosophy
Others to be covered later
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