Philosophy of science - Topics

Cladistics vs phenetics: what counts as a natural group Why the history of science stopped being a list of geniuses and became a study of institutions Do physical laws have exceptions or are they applied outside their domain? How a scientific dispute gets closed depends as much on institutions as on the data Why abiogenesis is so hard to test in a lab The mechanical philosophy replaced Aristotelian causes and made clockwork the metaphor of choice Do experiments discover or only test what theory already predicted? The conflict thesis in history and why historians reject it The second law of thermodynamics and why entropy gives time a direction Why two theories can fit the same data and only one survive Whether miracle claims can be tested scientifically Experimental philosophy and natural philosophy meant different things to the people who used the terms Locke and Hume on where our ideas actually come from Does qualitative research belong in the natural sciences? Why a rule in biology usually means a statistical tendency rather than a law Which leadership theories can actually be falsified and which are unfalsifiable by design Where do the limits of empirical measurement sit? Do scientific laws describe reality or only predict observations? The clockwork universe metaphor shaped what counted as an explanation for two centuries Whether we are now doing technology driven science instead of science driven technology Reproducibility and generalizability pull in opposite directions Why biology has far fewer laws than physics Does empirical evidence accumulate into theory or just pile up? Knowing when to stop adding detail to a model What makes a statement a law rather than a theory? How does experimental science differ from observational and theoretical science? Why some disciplines treat their founders as authorities long after they were wrong Falsifiability was meant to separate science from pseudoscience but it fails on its own examples What is lost when a scientific finding is dismissed as merely subjective Falsifiability: a statement you cannot test is not a scientific law Why calling evolution just a theory misunderstands the scientific use of the word Buddhist and Hindu approaches to cosmology and modern physics