Exploring the Philosophy of Science and Technology

📚 Science is often seen as a mirror of reality, but it is influenced by cultural and social biases.

🧪 The understanding of science has evolved in the 20th century to recognize the influence of philosophical and social presuppositions.

🔬 Science is a human activity that evolves and changes over time.

🔬 Science is the best picture of reality that we have, although it is not perfect.

🧪 Francis Bacon is considered the father of empiricism and the scientific method.

🧠 Inductivism is a form of reasoning in which individual cases are used to predict future cases.

🔑 Scientists like Faraday and Darwin claimed to use inductive reasoning, but actually relied on metaphysical speculations and abduction, respectively.

❓ Inductivism, the widely believed way of understanding science, suffers from problems of justification and circular reasoning.

🔬 Logical positivism, developed by the Vienna Circle, considered only empirically supportable statements as meaningful and excluded theology and metaphysics.

🗣️ Language is important for expressing thoughts and formulating propositions about the world.

❄️ Statements about the world can have a truth value, such as the statement 'It is snowing in Ottawa.'

🤔 Metaphysical statements and questions, like free will or the Big Bang Theory, may be considered meaningless by logical positivists.

🔍 Logical positivism aims to reconstruct scientific theories using formal logic, but faces challenges with induction and informal assumptions.

🔬 Science is a collection of statements and propositions, and scientists verify individual observations rather than theories.

✅ The positivists' strict verification principle excluded theoretical terms in science, leading to the loosening of criteria to include confirmation and partial support.

Science is about falsification, not verification.

Facts are important, but theories are more important.

The positivist view of science focuses on facts, while the falsificationist view focuses on laws.

🔍 Falsification is a key concept in science, where theories are accepted once the probability of being wrong is close to zero.

🌍 Einstein's theory of relativity has been extensively tested and has not been falsified, but it is not a complete picture of reality.

🔬 New technologies allow for further testing and validation of scientific theories.

🔭 Realism and anti-realism are two different perspectives on the nature of scientific theories.

💡 The Renaissance period was a significant turning point in the development of science, combining metaphysics and technology.

📚 Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of scientific paradigms, highlighting the influence of social and cultural factors in the practice of science.