ABSTRACT
Science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests and strange deviations, too. The sciences include the physical sciences such as physics, geology and chemistry, the biological sciences of anatomy, zoology and medicine and the social sciences such as psychology and sociology. Philosophers of science have examined the logic of how evidence is gathered, how theories are proposed and how and why scientists accept new theories to come up with several theories of how scientific progress is made. Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory of paradigms in science was one of the most influential philosophies of the last half of the 20th century. Most of Kuhn’s and Popper’s examples of how science develops come from physics, a mathematically precise discipline whose paradigm is well understood and very binding upon the field. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
