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The Impact of Science

What’s New in Philosophy of Science?

So what’s going on in philosophy of science at the moment? Bora Dogan describes some of the current highlights.

Philosophers of science today are mainly concerned with two lines of inquiry. How does science give us knowledge of the world (if indeed it does)? And how do we make sense of current scientific theories, particularly in physics and biology?

Scientific methodology

The first of these questions is the one with which the likes of Popper and Kuhn wrestled in the past (see previous page), but the debates have moved on. As David Papineau, of King’s College London, remarks, “Nobody works with Popper’s assumptions any more.” These days, the debate is between instrumentalists (not of the musical variety) and realists. Instrumentalists argue that scientific theories do not tell us what the world is really like but they do allow us to make predictions about the world.

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