Philosophy and Science
also equal to R, S and T. 3 If one knows that species best adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on their traits to the next generation, scientists can deduce that, if the temperature of an ecosystem rises, the organisms better adapted to warmer climates will outlive the others. Thus, being the backbone of scientific deduction, and creating problems which science can investigate in the physical world, Philosophy contributes significantly to scientific methodology. Despite this, philosophers have proposed various arguments that conflict with scientific discovery, yet even this has somewhat aided science, by constantly sparking change and a novel way of investigating problems. The induction principle suggests that, if one knows a sample of a population displays a feature, it can be assumed that everything in the whole population displays this feature. 4 Karl Popper, in his 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, uses this principle to argue that all science remains hypothetical. 5 His reasoning was that, if a property of an object is believed to be true, and we demonstrate that property with another sample of the population, it cannot be proven that this feature holds true for all objects in the population. For example, if a chicken notices a farmer bringing food for it every morning for hundreds of days in a row, it is not safe to assume that the next day the farmer will not do something different. Popper takes this further to say that scientific observations can only falsify scientific hypotheses. Through this principle of falsification, if something does not abide to the laws of the theory, that theory is falsified. 6 This has confused scientific procedures, as the knowledge of previous theories means nothing whenmaking up a new one, as everything can be falsified. Anomalies to the general trend can ruin a whole scientific theory. Another philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, denied this idea of falsification, and instead argued that science moves between different paradigms, which are large bodies of scientific theory. These paradigms can have inconsistencies but can be constantly refined. Paradigm ‘ shifts ’ occur when evidence leads to a majority rejection of a previous paradigm. 7 In 1811 Johann FriedrichMeckel proposed the idea that frombirth, humans develop features as they grow up, corresponding to other animal types. For example, human embryos have slits in their necks which look like gills. Owing to this fact, many bel ieved Meckel’s theory. It was only later, when enough understanding about DNA and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution arose, that this was proved false, as we now know fish and humans share some of the same DNA froma common ancestor. 8 When using logical thinking to determine whether a theory is true or not based on other evidence, science can move forward, as displayed in this certain scenario. Thus, it turns out that, even though philosophy has challenged scientific methodology, it exposes the gaps within scientific theory, and this insight allows scientists to challenge prior theories, and come up with newer, more valid ones. Furthermore, philosophy has had a wider impact on science practically, and continues to aid science education. In the twentieth century, major advancements in physics relied on philosophy. Werner Heisenberg used the notion that knowledge arises from what is physically observable, and by eliminating the Measure Problem of unobservable Multiverses, 9 he produced his revolutionary paper
3 Passmore 1948-1949. 4 The Problem of Induction 2018. 5 Popper 1934. 6 Ibid. 7 Kuhn 2018. 8 Vickers 2019. 9 Wolchover and Byrne 2015.
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