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Is the Philosophy of Science Scientific?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

A. Cornelius Benjamin
A. Cornelius Benjamin*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Abstract

It is helpful for any enterprise to stop occasionally and examine itself. Science has done this rather infrequently in its long and eventful history, and there has not been, in general, any continuity in these self-examinations. As a result the history of the philosophy of science has been a rather spotty affair. My belief is that the philosophy of science should also, at times, become self-critical. When a study is concerned primarily with methods of other disciplines it tends to underemphasize the role played by the methods which it itself uses. What is the method of the philosophy of science, and is it justifiable? Can there be a satisfactory study of science and can this be scientific?

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , October 1960 , pp. 351 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © 1959 by Philosophy of Science Association

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References

1 P. W. Bridgman: The Way Things Are. Harvard University Press, 1959, p. 7.

2 W. B. Gallie, “What Makes a Subject Scientific ?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. VIII, No. 30, August, 1957.

3 J. A. Thomson, An Introduction to Science, Holt, New York, 1911, pp. 17-31.

4 John Dewey, How We Think, Heath, New York, rev. ed. 1933, chs VI, VII.

5 Operations Research has shown, of course, that there may be a pattern which is common to “doing” and “knowing”, since these are both occasions when we are trying to achieve certain “optimum” results. But such a formula is certainly not the simple one which Dewey offers, and if it is to be a good one it must provide, as part of itself, a method for distinguishing cases of “doing” from cases of “knowing”.