Philosophy of science - Topics

Experimental philosophy and natural philosophy meant different things to the people who used the terms Cladistics vs phenetics: what counts as a natural group Empiricism versus rationalism: is reason or experience the source of knowledge? How a scientific dispute gets closed depends as much on institutions as on the data The conflict thesis in history and why historians reject it Why the history of science stopped being a list of geniuses and became a study of institutions Whether miracle claims can be tested scientifically Do experiments discover or only test what theory already predicted? The role of experience in knowledge: a very old argument that never ended Why calling evolution just a theory misunderstands the scientific use of the word Why the multiverse remains outside the reach of testable science Buddhist and Hindu approaches to cosmology and modern physics Evidence hierarchies differ by field: what counts as proof in medicine vs ecology Reproducibility and generalizability pull in opposite directions The line between fringe and revolutionary is only obvious after the fact and that is the problem Where do the limits of empirical measurement sit? Do physical laws have exceptions or are they applied outside their domain? How does experimental science differ from observational and theoretical science? The mechanical philosophy replaced Aristotelian causes and made clockwork the metaphor of choice Would we even recognize alien life if it were right in front of us? Does empirical evidence accumulate into theory or just pile up? The second law of thermodynamics and why entropy gives time a direction The clockwork universe metaphor shaped what counted as an explanation for two centuries Why some disciplines treat their founders as authorities long after they were wrong String theory after fifty years without a testable prediction Does qualitative research belong in the natural sciences? Where hypotheses come from: observation first or theory first? Why some fields resist becoming experimental at all Locke and Hume on where our ideas actually come from Why two theories can fit the same data and only one survive Is a model a claim about the world or a useful stand-in Can a science be experimental without being manipulable?