Appendix: An introduction to philosophy of science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
Science is a human cognitive enterprise, and philosophy of science is a part of epistemology (the theory of knowledge), although philosophers of science also face logical, metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic questions. Questions concerning the nature of science go back to the beginnings of philosophy, but philosophy of science only became a separate subspecialty about a century ago. Important figures in the early development of modern philosophy of science are David Hume (1738,1748), Immanuel Kant (1787), John Stuart Mill (1843), William Whewell (1840), and major scientists themselves such as Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Herschel. Only at the end of the nineteenth century was the field launched with striking monographs by scientists or historians of science such as Ernst Mach (1942), Piere Duhem (1906), and Henri Poincaré (1905).
In the first half of the twentieth century the so-called “logical positivists” dominated thinking about the philosophy of science, although Karl Popper's views also exerted a growing influence. In the 1960s philosophy of science took a historical and empirical turn that has become dominant over the last generation, although many contemporary philosophers of science do abstract formal work that resembles in style the work of the logical positivists. Recent developments in cognitive science have begun to have a strong influence on philosophy of science, but it is too early to judge how significant this influence will be (see Giere 1988, Goldman 1986, Holland et al. 1986, Langley et al. 1987, and Thagard 1988).
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- The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics , pp. 281 - 329Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992