This concluding chapter focuses on only two topics. The first section returns to the topic of science's contested rationality to resolve the issues pondered in Chapter 4, using the physics of motion as a concrete example. The second section provides a concise overview of scientific method.

Other chapters ended with five study questions, but this chapter ends with ten exit questions covering material from this entire book. These questions correspond to the 10 items in Figure 13.2 showing an academic curriculum on the nature of science in general and scientific method in particular. Ten questions cannot possibly cover all of the material in this book. Nevertheless, success in answering these representative questions well is indicative of a philosopher-scientist possessing a sophisticated, academic understanding of scientific method. In turn, understanding science helps in developing technology and appreciating nature.

Motion and rationality

Recall from Chapter 4 that Sir Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and other prominent philosophers have challenged the very foundations of science, citing four deadly woes: (1) Science cannot prove any theory either true or false. (2) Observations are theory-laden, and theory is underdetermined by data. (3) Successive paradigms are incommensurable. (4) What makes a belief scientific is merely that it is what scientists say. The upshot of these woes is that science is alleged to be irrational or arational, unable to claim any truths about the physical world, principally because nature does not significantly constrain theory choice. These four woes were introduced in Chapter 4, but resolution has had to wait until this final chapter after first having developed all of the essential components of scientific method in the intervening chapters.