🔬 History & Philosophy of Science

What you’ll learn

1. What Even Counts as Science?Introduce the demarcation problem and the course’s through-line: science as a fallible, self-correcting practice rather than a fixed method or settled facts.The demarcation problem asks what separates science from pseudoscience. Easy answers — especially ‘the scientific method’ — fail, because no single recipe fits all sciences and pseudosciences can imitate the steps. The course will pursue deeper marks: testability, refutability, and self-correction.
2. The Two-Thousand-Year Authority of AristotleEstablish the authority and method of Aristotelian science to show what the Scientific Revolution overturned.Aristotle built a coherent, common-sense, largely deductive account of nature that dominated for two millennia. Its strength was systematic reasoning and observation; its weakness was rarely testing ‘obvious’ conclusions experimentally, allowing plausible errors like ‘heavier falls faster’ to persist.
3. The Scientific Revolution: Learning to Ask NatureExplain the methodological core of the Scientific Revolution through Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton.Between 1543 and 1687 the revolution replaced authority with measurement and experiment. Bacon articulated empiricism; Galileo used experiment and instruments to overrule Aristotle; Copernicus let theory correct the senses; Newton unified heaven and Earth under predictive law, setting the standard for science.
4. Hume’s Bombshell: The Problem of InductionPresent Hume’s problem of induction as a permanent challenge to the logic of empirical generalization.Hume showed that no number of past observations can logically justify a universal law, and that defending induction by its success is circular. The black swan illustrates that confirmation is weaker than it feels. Science’s foundation is habit that works, not provable logic — a lesson in humility.
5. Popper: Science as the Art of Being WrongExplain Popper’s falsificationism as a response to Hume and a criterion of demarcation, and its main weakness.Popper accepted that laws can’t be verified but noted they can be falsified, redefining science as bold, refutable conjecture; falsifiability marks science from pseudoscience (Einstein’s 1919 test vs unfalsifiable theories). But scientists showed that single anomalies rarely refute theories, since predictions rest on many assumptions (e.g., Neptune’s discovery).
6. Kuhn: Paradigms and the Shape of RevolutionsPresent Kuhn’s paradigms, normal science, and revolutions, and the challenge they pose to a purely logical view of progress.Kuhn described science as normal puzzle-solving within a paradigm, punctuated by crises and revolutions when anomalies accumulate. Because rival paradigms can be incommensurable, shifts aren’t settled by neutral logic alone — a more social, human portrait of science that raised hard questions about objectivity and progress.
7. Is Science Telling Us the Truth?Lay out the realism vs anti-realism debate about whether science’s theories describe reality.Realists argue that predictive success would be a miracle if theories were false, so unobservables are probably real; anti-realists reply with the pessimistic meta-induction — past successful theories (caloric, ether) were still wrong. Middle positions like structural realism hold that a theory’s structure survives revolutions even as its pictures change.
8. Why Science Works AnywayComplete the through-line: science works because it is an institution engineered for self-correction.No single method or perfectly objective individual grounds science; its reliability lies in social machinery — peer review, replication, open publication, and rewards for overturning ideas — that catches errors despite bias. The replication crisis, diagnosed and fixed with science’s own tools, exemplifies self-correction and marks real science from dogma.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (2002)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (2003)
• Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996)
• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
• Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
• Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
• Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (2019)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

Related Science courses