science

   The modern meaning of 'science' is something like 'a discipline that seeks a programmatic, ordered investigation into the operations of the natural world leading to the discovery of laws of nature and the consequent ability to predict the development of natural systems'; the traditional meaning, coming from the Latin scientia, is something like 'any systematic, principled investigation into a given subject matter'. Descartes's rejection of medieval forms and potencies for a mechanical understanding of the universe was crucial for science in the modern sense to advance. Equally important was Francis Bacon's (rather na¨ıve) description of science as consisting in the enumeration of inductive instances leading to the formation of a hypothesis and eventually the identification of physical laws. Today there is a much greater appreciation among philosophers of science for the communal and non-rational aspects of scientific discovery, for instance, in the work of Michael Polanyi. The absolutisation of scientific knowledge as the only form is known as 'scientism', a view that is closely aligned with naturalism. The broad definition of 'science' in the traditional sense raises the questions of identifying which other disciplines are appropriately scientific (for example, theology, hermeneutics), and which are the appropriate criteria for making such an identification.

   See falsification principle; materialism; science and religion; verification/verifiability principle

   Further reading: Polanyi 1974; Ratzsch 1986; Rosenberg 2000