The philosophy of science seeks to understand the nature and justification of scientific knowledge. It has proven difficult to provide a definitive account of scientific method that can decisively serve to distinguish science from non-science. Thus there are legitimate arguments about exactly where the borders are, which is known as the problem of demarcation. There is nonetheless a set of core precepts that have broad consensus among published philosophers of science and within the scientific community at large. For example, it is universally agreed that scientific hypotheses and theories must be capable of being independently tested and verified by other scientists in order to become accepted by the scientific community.
There are different schools of thought in the philosophy of scientific method. The most popular position is empirism, which claims that knowledge is created by a process involving observation and that hence scientific theories are the result of generalizations from observation. Empirism is generally held together with inductivism and positivism, which try to explain the way in which general theories can be justified by the finite number of observations humans can do and the hence finite amount of empirical evidence available to confirm scientific theories that make an infinite number of predictions that do not and cannot deductively follow from the evidence. It has been a long running matter of philosophical debate whether such positions require metaphysical assumptions about the structure of the world that themselves cannot be justified in a scientific way, and whether that poses a problem for science or not. Biologist Stephen J. Gould, for example, maintained that 1) uniformity of law and 2) uniformity of processes across time and space must first be assumed before you can proceed as a scientist doing science. Gould summarized this view as follows:
"The assumption of spatial and temporal invariance of natural laws is by no means unique to geology since it amounts to a warrant for inductive inference which, as Bacon showed nearly four hundred years ago, is the basic mode of reasoning in empirical science. Without assuming this spatial and temporal invariance, we have no basis for extrapolating from the known to the unknown and, therefore, no way of reaching general conclusions from a finite number of observations. (Since the assumption is itself vindicated by induction, it can in no way “prove” the validity of induction - an endeavor virtually abandoned after Hume demonstrated its futility two centuries ago)."[51]
Empirism holds that the landmark of scientific theories is their verifiability by induction from evidence.
Emprism has stood in contrast to rationalism, the opposing position which holds that knowledge is created by the human intellect, not by observation. The most recent and most sophisticated version of rationalism is critical rationalism, which attempts to acknowledge the fact that a connection exists between observation and theories, but rejects the way that empirism claims the nature of this connection to be. More specifically, critical rationalism claims that theories are not generated by observation, but the other way around, observation is made in the light of theories—it is "theory-laden" and never neutral—and that the only way a theory can be affected by observation is when comes in conflict with observation. In this view, there is no induction, only deduction with the key being the modus tollens. Critical rationalism acordingly proposes falsifiability as the landmark of empirical theories and falsification as the empirical method. It argues for the ability of science to increase the scope of testable knowledge, but at the same time against its authority, by emphasizing its inherent fallibility. It proposes that science should be content with the rational elimination of errors in its theories, not in seeking for their verification (such as claiming certain or probable proof or disproof; both the proposal and falsification of a theory are only of methodological, conjectural, and tentative character in critical rationalism).[52] This position, first brought forward by austrian-british philosopher Karl Popper, stands in sharp opposition to the prevalent popular as well as academic views on epistemology and the philosophy of science. It controversially implies that evidence[53] and scientific method do not actually exist.[54] Popper held that there is only one method, and that this method is universal, not in any way specific to science: The negative method of trial and error. It covers not only all products of the human mind, including science, mathematics, philosophy, art and so on, but also the evolution of life.[55] Popper especially questioned those positions that make a difference between natural and social sciences and criticized the prevalent philosophy of the social sciences as scientistic, as a mere imitation of the actual practice in the natural sciences. In this context, he contributed to the Positivism dispute, a philosophical dispute between Critical rationalism (Popper, Albert) and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Habermas) about the methodology of the social sciences.[56] In contrast to positivism, which argues that science makes predictions that are guaranteed by evidence or at least made highly probable, or made more probable than can be achieved by other methods, Popper held the exact opposite to be true: Scientific theories are good because they are almost certainly false, which is the same as saying very improbable or easily falsifiable – yet cannot be successfully falsified (which, according to Popper, is emphatically not saying that they are in any way likely not to be falsified in the next instant, any time in the future, or over the long run). Popper, together with students William W. Bartley and David Miller, also questioned the classical theory of rationality for which rational knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular stands out as knowledge that can be justified in a way that other claims cannot be justified (justified by evidence, by verification, by high probability). Popper criticized the very concept of justification (see justificationism) and argued that the only purpose of rationality is to eliminate false ideas by criticism (for non-empirical claims) and falsification (for empirical claims). He held that rationality has no way of justifying or sanctioning ideas. Popper, Bartley and Miller also argued against limits of rationality, especially against seeing falsifiability as a limit of rationality rather than merlely a limit of observability.
Another position, Instrumentalism, colloquially termed "shut up and calculate", rejects the concept of truth and emphasizes merely the utility of theories as instruments for explaining and predicting phenomena.[57] It essentially claims that scientific theories are black boxes with only their input (initial conditions) and output (predictions) being relevant. Consequences, notions and logical structure of the theories are claimed to be something that should simply be ignored and that scientists shouldn't make a fuss about (see interpretations of quantum mechanics).
A position often cited in political debates to conquer controverial views like creationism that purport to be scientific is methodological naturalism. It maintains that scientific investigation must adhere to empirical study and independent verification as a process for properly developing and evaluating natural explanations for observable phenomena.[58] Methodological naturalism, therefore, rejects supernatural explanations, arguments from authority and biased observational studies.
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