Philosophy of Science

What is Science ? Science is a word derived in the recent past from the Latin word 'Scientia'. Scientia means knowledge , a knowing, expertness or experience. Science is an intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experimentation. Relation Between Science and Philosophy of Science  Philosophy of science, a branch of philosophy , spends a good bit of time trying to identify scientific and unscientific work, trying to figure out the logic with which scientific explanations and claims are grounded and working to understand the relation between theory and empirical data. Thus, acceptable laws and theories of science will be outputs from this process.  Philosophical tools are used at many instances to discover and build scientific knowledge   The goal of philosophy of science is not to answer scientific questions but to answer questions of science.  Philosophical too

Science can be considered as both a body of knowledge and a process of acquiring new knowledge about the physical and natural world.  Formulation of new theories in science, debunking or superseding theories can be possible outcomes of acquisition new knowledge from successful scientific inquiry. Such occurrences where refutation of theories put forward by many famous scientists were evident in the past years.  Scientific inquiry refers to diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work. It consists of ordered steps to be followed when formulating new theories.  The ordered steps of scientific inquiry are as follows.  1. Identification of the problem 2. Observation 3.Formulating hypotheses based on the observations 4. Test hypothesis 5. Analyze results 6. Draw a conclusion Scientific inquiry generally aims to obtain knowledge in the form of testable explanations that scientists can use to predict the result