A path through philosophy
What is science?
What makes knowledge scientific — and how does nature yield its laws?
Science is our most powerful way of knowing, yet its own foundations are strangely hard to secure. Follow the search for method — from the four causes to falsifiability — and the recurring worry that no amount of evidence can ever quite close the gap.
- 1
The first program of science: to know a thing is to know its four causes; genuine knowledge is demonstration from first principles, grounded in patient observation of nature.
- 2
The New Organon: sweep away inherited authority and the mind's 'idols', and wring nature's laws from it by systematic experiment and induction.
Responding toAristotle's deduction from received principles
- 3
Reads nature as a machine written in mathematics; certainty flows from clear reason, and the physical world reduces to matter in motion.
Responding toBacon's trust in the senses
- 4
The problem of induction: no run of past observations can logically guarantee the next case, so our faith in laws of nature rests on habit, not proof.
Responding toBacon and the inductivists
- 5
Rescues Newtonian science from Hume: the mind itself supplies causality and mathematical form, so the laws hold with necessity — but only for the world as it appears.
Responding toHume's doubt about causation
- 6
Turns method into a toolkit: the experimental methods of agreement, difference, residues, and concomitant variation are how we actually track down causes.
Responding toHume's challenge, in practice
- 7
Beyond deduction and induction lies abduction — inference to the best explanation; science is a self-correcting process that converges on truth in the long run.
- 8
No theory is ever verified; what marks a claim as scientific is that it forbids something — it is falsifiable — and knowledge grows by bold conjecture and ruthless testing.
Responding tothe inductivists and the verificationists
- 9
Science is not steady accumulation: long stretches of 'normal science' under a shared paradigm are broken by revolutions that replace the framework itself.
Responding toPopper's picture of rational falsification
- 10
There is no clean line between theory and observation, or the analytic and the empirical: our beliefs meet experience as one connected web, revisable at any point.
Responding tothe positivists' tidy divisions
Each attempt to pin down 'the scientific method' is answered by a deeper doubt — about induction, about paradigms, about the line between fact and theory. Science advances anyway, which may be the most interesting fact of all.