Studies pertaining to the Philosophy of Science concern themselves with questions centred around the assumptions
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Sahil Warsi St.Stephens’ Coll. Studies pertaining to the Philosophy of Science concern themselves with questions centred around the assumptions, methods and consequences ofScience. They engage in weighing the merits and demerits of various scientific outlooks and approaches, while often overlapping with metaphysics, epistemology – in so far as inquiring as to what degree science may really be considered to be a study of truth. The questions that this paper will concern itselfwith, namely what exactly makes a scientific theory good (and what is it) – and what does a Scientist do when a theory is refuted or falsified; also fall in the larger purview of what scientific philosophers concern themselves with. Karl Popper demarcated the central role of the Philosophy of Science, was to distinguish science from non-science: this is what is referred to as the Demarcation problem. Logical Positivists like Popper grounded science in observation – whereas what fell on the other side of the fence, ie – non-science was drawn from non-observational techniques and was considered to be nonsense. Popper stated that the pillar of science lay within the idea of falsifiable claims – claims that can, atleast in principle, be proven to be false. The aim of science, was understood to lie in seeking a satisfactory explanation of“whatever strikes us as being in need of explanation.” Popper identifies two components of a explanation, namely: the explicandum: consisting of statements by which one describes the state of affairs to be explained – that is, it defines the phenomenon; and secondly, the explicans: which form the ‘explanation’ in the narrower sense of the term. Each of the two components has it’s unique characteristics. The explicandum for instance, requires (usually) no proof – and it is usually understood to be true. The explicans on the other hand, is in most cases, unknown and this establishes the idea of scientific explanation as discovering something unknown with the known. So the question arises, what is it, that can make an explanation satisfactory? In the case of the explicans, a number of conditions need to be met. Firstly, it must logically entail the explicandum and secondly, the explicans ought to be true (even after critical examination and a sufficient duration of time and testing). In the case that one cannot establish the latter to be true, it must possess independent evidence in it’s favour – which is another way of saying – it must be independently testable and the degree to which is it satisfactory, as an explanation, depends on how many independent tests it can pass. It is appropriate at this juncture, to examine this idea of ‘Independence’ and the role it plays in making one scientific explanation better than another. It’s value can perhaps be best understood in contrast to it’s opposing characteristics. A scientific theory that is not independent can either be seen as being ad hoc orcircular in nature. In terms of circularity or what is philosophically called, begging
