ABSTRACT
The philosophy of science, a branch of epistemology, studies the nature of scientific knowledge and understanding. Philosophy of science emphasized the "logic" of science in abstraction from, and often in direct opposition to, the psychology of actual scientists. Perhaps the central problem in the philosophy of science concerns the evidential conditions in which a scientific theory is accepted. Moreover, recent philosophers of science have argued that the older models of scientific rationality often bear little relation to the actual practices of scientists, either in the history of science or in current science. The traditional view in the philosophy of science emphasized the logic of scientific inquiry. Since logic is concerned with relations among propositions or sentences, the received view formulated its models of science in purely propositional or sentential terms. The significance of visual imagery in human thought has received illuminating treatment in recent cognitive science.
