Philosophy of Science: from Observation to Scientific Theory

Philosophy of Science: from Observation to Scientific Theory

Are you interested in what is the relation between scientific theories and reality? Are you curious about how scientific reasoning operates or what is the main backbone schema of every scientific inference?

These are issues concerning the foundations of science that was mainly a concern of the philosophical stream of Logical Empiricist or Positivists in the 20th century and was the base of the emergence of the philosophy of science in general.

The course will analyze the following topics:

-The relation of language and reality

-The relation between observation and theory formation

-The interrelation of causation and induction

-The anatomy of Human Reasoning

-The analysis of ideas to sensory impressions: simple ideas and complex ideas and how they are formed from observation

-The problem of induction

-The assessment of the truth or falsity  of synthetic propositions

-The inductive reasoning

-The contribution of philosophy to the foundation of science

-The strict empirical stance towards language and its concepts for the formation of theories

-The verifiability principle

-The criterion of verifiability

-How formal methods influenced the Logical Positivists

Also, the following questions will be explored:

-How does observation structures our scientific theories?

-How causation is related to scientific reasoning

-What is the problem of induction and its relation to causal reasoning?

-What are analytic propositions?

-What are synthetic propositions?

-What are synthetic a priori propositions and how they are related to experience and observation?

-Why theories must depend on observation?

-Why analytic propositions are necessarily true

and much more!

Generally, this course will be based on the accumulation of ideas that resulted in the emergence of the philosophical movement of Logical empiricism and their concerns about the foundations of science and its formulation of scientific theories

With this course, you will be able to understand the main issues around the philosophy of science today and make you capable of using the main philosophical ideas of the philosophy of science and analytic philosophy to deepen into further analysis and research of the foundations of science for those who are interested. The Concepts of causation and how it is related to scientific inference will be analyzed. the relation between the language and reality will be of main analysis as out of this relation scientific theories are constructed and structured

We will observe how British empiricism's ideas were exploited by the Logical Positivists; how the ideas of Immanuel Kant and the developments of the formal methods within the philosophical doctrine of Logicism resulted in the creation of a strict empirical language that has both formal features and empirical ones and used for the analysis of scientific propositions.

This course is suitable for undergraduate and masters students of philosophy, scientists who want to explore the philosophical discussions around the issues concerning the foundation of science as well as beginners with a little knowledge of philosophy that want to explore how philosophy can conceptually contribute to the foundation of scientific inference and methodology.

The emergence of Logical Empiricism

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What you will learn

• You will be able to answer how observation structures our scientific theories and how causation is related to scientific reasoning.
• You will be able to formulate the basic views of Logical Positivism regarding the interrelation of observation and theory formation.
• You will able to understand the analysis from ideas to sensory impressions; namely, simple ideas and complex ideas and their formation.

Rating: 3.92857

Level: Beginner Level

Duration: 1.5 hours

Instructor: Sp. Gal