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The Impact of Science

A Brief History of… Philosophy of Science

Rick Lewis describes what philosophers have thought about science over the last century and a half.

The French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798-1857) followed Immanuel Kant in believing that the true nature of things is unknowable; all we can know is the world of phenomena – of appearances. Comte therefore distrusted scientific ‘explanations’ of an underlying reality and believed that the purpose of science is just to make successful predictions about the world. The method he recommended for doing science, which he called ‘positivism’, is based on observation alone. Observations should be recorded and from those observations, predictions can be made about what will be observed in the future, using what he called ‘laws of succession’. He thought that to go beyond this and theorize about the unobservable underlying causal mechanisms was asking for trouble – it would lead to mistaken preconceptions, mis-observation to fit favoured theories and so on.

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