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Many philosophers are wont to assert that all sciences have an underlying philosophy regardless of claims to the contrary:
This article, as any, is not exhaustive, yet covers arguably the most common ground in the Philosophy of Science.
Science makes assumptions about the way the world is, and the way in which theory relates to the world.
A central concept in the philosophy of science is empiricism, or dependence on evidence. Empiricism is the view that knowledge derives from experience of the world. In this sense, scientific statements are subject to and derived from our experiences or observations. Scientific theories are developed and tested through experiments and observations, via empirical methods. Once reproduced widely enough this information counts as evidence, upon which the scientific community bases its explanationAn explanation is a statement which points to causes, context and consequences of some object (or process, state of affairs etc. together with rules or laws which link these to the object. Some of these elements of the explanation may be implicit. Explanas of how things work.
Observations involve perceptionThe philosophy of perception concerns how mental processes and symbols depend on the world internal and external to the perceiver. Our perception of the external world begins with the senses, which lead us to generate empirical concepts representing the w, and so are themselves cognitive acts. That is, observations are themselves embedded in our understanding of the way in which the world works; as this understanding changes, the observations themselves may apparently change.
Scientists attempt to use induction, deductionSee natural deduction Deductive reasoning See also: logic Venn diagram inductive reasoning Both statistics and the scientific method rely on both induction and deduction. and quasi-empirical methodsQuasi-empirical methods are applied in science and in mathematics. The term empirical methods' refers to experiment, disclosure of apparatus for reproduction of experiments, and other ways in which science is validated by scientists. These are studied ext, and invoke key conceptual metaphorConceptual metaphor In cognitive linguistics metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain, e. one person's life experience versus another's. A conceptual domain is any coherent organization of experiences to work observations into a coherent, self-consistent structure.
In contrast to realism, instrumentalism holds that our perceptions, scientific ideas and theories do not necessarily reflect the real world accurately, but are useful instruments to explain, predict and control our experiences. To an instrumentalist, electrons and magnetic fields are convenient ideas that may or may not actually exist. For instrumentalists, empirical method is used to do no more than show that theories are consistent with observations. Instrumentalism is derived in part from John Dewey's pragmatism.
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