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Philosophy of Science
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Philosophy of science is the study of what science is, how it justifies its claims, and what separates a scientific explanation from one that only looks like it. It examines the working assumptions every other discipline in this atlas uses without stopping to argue for them: what a theory has to do to be tested, when a result counts as evidence, and how science changes over time. Its central figures include Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, whose work the atlas's concept entries draw on directly.
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Central QuestionWhat is the demarcation criterion that separates genuine science from pseudoscience, and can any single criterion, such as falsifiability, actually do that work across every field that calls itself scientific? 1 ScopePhilosophy of science examines the foundations, methods and implications of science, asking what distinguishes science from non-science, how scientific theories are justified, and what scientific knowledge can be said to represent. 1 SignificanceKarl Popper's 1934 proposal that falsifiability, not verifiability, is what distinguishes genuine scientific theories from non-scientific ones became one of the most influential single ideas in the modern philosophy of science, still debated and refined by philosophers of science today. 1 Disputed
Founded YearFrancis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) set out an inductive method for acquiring scientific knowledge and is commonly cited as founding philosophy of science as a subject of study; the modern analytic discipline is more often dated to Karl Popper's Logik der Forschung (1934), which reframed the field around falsifiability. Cross-Tradition Connections
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Karl Popper, Scientists A pivotal modern figure through the falsifiability criterion, not the founder of the field, whose roots trace to Aristotle and the early modern philosophers of scientific method.
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