An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Introduction

To the lay reader, much of what is written by scientists can seem barely comprehensible. Even to someone who has had some science courses in school, a sentence like “The M2 proton channel … has a 40-residue region that interacts with membranes consisting of a transmembrane helix (which mediates tetramerization, drug-binding, and channel activity), followed by a basic amphiphilic helix important for budding of the virus from cellular membranes and release (scission)” will seem as though it has been written in a language not quite identical to English (Fiorin, Carnevale, & DeGrado, 2010). As a result, the non-specialist may find much of what is accomplished by scientists mysterious and esoteric.

Philosophers of science have sometimes attempted to “humanize” scientific work by portraying scientific methods as extensions of our ordinary ways of knowing things. It is true that scientists use technologies both material and mathematical to make observations and draw conclusions that we could never achieve otherwise. Nonetheless, they observe, conjecture, infer, and decide just as we all do, if perhaps in a more systematic and sophisticated way. Although a certain kind of training is needed to understand some of the language scientists use to report their findings, those findings are not the result of magic or trickery, but of an especially refined and disciplined application of the cognitive resources we enjoy as a species.