Talk:Science

The divorce of science from philosophy is completely unjustified. --Daniel C. Boyer

Because?...B

Because it is a set of theories or a method of inquiry about how the world is, it is fundamentally an aspect of philosophy, and the divorce exists for no other reason than to enable science to get away without ever having to defend the a priori assumptions on which it bases its method. Why are these assumptions beyond challenge? --Daniel C. Boyer

Was there ever a parting of philosophy and science? Even very recent philosophers have been influential (for better or for worse). A few names that spring to mind are Wittgenstein, Popper, Victor Kraft, Lacatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend. NielsBohr seems to have been a relativist [1] (http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=551466). Einstein, who wrote philosophical papers of his own, was inspired by ErnstMach. Einstein and Bohr, of course did challenge a priori assumptions about our ability to be objective. --ChrisSteinbach

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The leading assertion of the second paragraph in the current article is false:

"Certain fundamental assumptions are needed for science. The first assumption is that of realism."

Realism as defined in the article or scientific realism[?] is not necessary to science. Science is no less compatible with instrumentalism[?] than it is with realism. Science does not require that unobservable theoretical entities[?], such as electrons, are "real"; science only requires that unobservables help explain and predict sense-data[?]. Besides the leading sentence, the rest of the paragraph has another sophmoric problem. In particular, equating "facts" and "physical objects and events" with the same ontological[?] status: "facts are real"; "physical objects and events are facts". (Whatever that is supposed to mean...although that terminology may be popular or conventional, it's meaning is far from clear. Hmm, sounds like an analytic philosophy critique.) The third paragraph about consistency fails to even mention or explain science's (or rather scientific theories' or laws') dependence on the much more relevant principal of induction. (Nevermind the problem of induction.) B 17:03 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

I removed this: "Some scientists in the hard sciences consider all scientific-like fields of study outside of the hard sciences (including the soft sciences) not to be true science, or even relegate them to the realm of pseudoscience."

The way this is phrased, that's just not true. In fact, this entire article was laced with unfounded anti-science remarks that were just egregiously POV. It started to look like a leftist Derrida-inspired deconstructionist tract to deligitimize science. RK 13:53 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I looked at the "anti-realism" paragraphs you removed, maybe it should be put in its own article, like Scientific realism[?] and rewritten as NPOV? (I don't understand much about the philosophy of science, so maybe I'm misled here) -- Rotem Dan 14:00 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)