Science - General, Recent Developments, Bibliography
knowledge objective scientific scientists
Science is a product, a particular kind of knowledge, as well as a process to obtain such knowledge. It is a social activity primarily aimed at obtaining objective and consensual knowledge about nature and to use this knowledge for socially desirable purposes. Scientists and philosophers disagree about whether scientific knowledge mirrors nature as it really is, or if it merely constitutes an instrument to describe and control natural processes and objects. Irrespective of the stance on this issue, scientists (and most philosophers) agree that objective and consensual knowledge can in fact be obtained, and that to a large extent the success of science derives from following certain rules and methods. Although there is no one scientific method that leads to true knowledge, there are rules and methods that are generally followed and in a loose way demarcate science methodologically from nonscience.
Additional Topics
The methodological foundation of modern science was laid during the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whereas one school of thought, going back to Francis Bacon, emphasized induction from particular observations and experiments, the followers of René Descartes favored a more hypothetical-deductivist approach. In the mid-nineteenth century, the two kinds of meth…
In classical sociology of science, such as that developed by Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) in particular, ideological, political, and economic factors form the framework of science development, but they do not affect the epistemic content of science. From the 1970s onward, groups of sociologists and philosophers have gone beyond this position and argued that science is not epistemically priv…
Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1985. Golinski, Jan. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Holton, Ger…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments