Assignment: Philosophy of Science

Assignment: Philosophy of Science

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Assignment: Philosophy of Science

The Learning Resources in this first week will help you answer these questions, and they will provide you with a foundation in the philosophy of science that will help you appreciate various research designs and methods. With this foundation, you will be encouraged to reflect on how your assumptions about the acquisition of truth and the nature of the world influence your approach to the research process.

For this Discussion, you will identify an area of interest for a possible research topic. As you read about the different philosophical orientations in this week’s readings, consider if one of these orientations most closely aligns with your worldview and a particular approach to research.

With these thoughts in mind:

By Day 4

Post a brief description of your topic of research interest. Next, state the philosophical orientation that reflects your worldview and explain the epistemological and ontological assumptions of this orientation. Then, explain how these assumptions lend themselves to one or more research approaches.

Babbie, E. (2017). Basics of social research (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

· Chapter 1, “Human Inquiry and Science”

Burkholder, G. J., Cox, K. A., & Crawford, L. M. (2016). The scholar-practitioner’s guide to research design. Baltimore, MD: Laureate Publishing.

· Chapter 2, “Philosophical Foundations and the Role of Theory in Research”

hilosophy of science is a sub-field of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of science. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than philosophy of science.

There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences (such as biology or physics). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

While philosophical thought pertaining to science dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivist movement, which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements’ meaningfulness and objectively assessing them. Charles Sanders Peirce and Karl Popper moved on from positivism to establish a modern set of standards for scientific methodology. Thomas Kuhn‘s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead arguing that any progress is relative to a “paradigm,” the set of questions, concepts, and practices that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period.^[1]

Subsequently, the coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became prominent due to W.V. Quine and others. Some thinkers such as Stephen Jay Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend in particular, argue that there is no such thing as the “scientific method“, so all approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones.