User:Benjah-bmm27/degree/hps

History and philosophy of science

Relevant general philosophy

• Philosophy:
• Argument, logic, logical consequences
• Reasoning
  • Deductive reasoning — deductive fallacies, e.g. ecological fallacy (unreasonable application of population statistics to an individual)
  • Inductive reasoning — the problem of induction, inductive fallacies e.g. argument from authority
• Supervenience

History of science

• History of science:
• History of chemistry: timeline of chemistry; structural theory, history of molecular theory, history of the periodic table, Chemical Revolution, alchemy
• History of materials science

Philosophy of science

• Philosophy of science: science, natural sciences, physical sciences, philosophy of physics, philosophy of chemistry

Scientific method

• Scientific method:
  • Experiment: empirical method, empirical research, empiricism
  • Theory: conjecture, hypothesis, data analysis, scientific theory, mathematical model, dependent and independent variables, statistical model, scientific modelling
  • Design of experiments: alternative hypothesis, null hypothesis, working hypothesis, experimental techniques, scientific control, controlling for a variable, factorial experiments
  • Experimental errors: confounding variables, spurious relationship, Type I and type II errors, confirmation bias, systemic bias, experimenter's bias, observational error, systematic bias, systematic error, experimental uncertainty analysis
  • Analysis of results: statistical significance, the principle of parsimony in science, Occam's razor, instrumentalism, pragmatism in science

Models of scientific inquiry

• Models of scientific inquiry
• Demarcation problem (what is and what isn't science?)
• 1543-1700: Scientific revolution
• 1900-1950: Logical positivism
• 1930s: Falsifiability (Popper)
• 1962: Paradigm shifts vs. normal science (Kuhn)
• Strong inference: J. R. Platt, Science (1964) 146, 347–353 (JSTOR version, open-access HTML version)

Criticism of science

• Criticism of science
• Antiscience, Antireductionism
• Science wars: opposition to scientistic materialism, scientism, reductionism in science, rationalisation of society
• Scientific realism vs. philosophical realism
• Scientific skepticism vs. philosophical skepticism
• Classic mistakes: misidentified chemical elements, polywater, cyclol hypothesis, Lysenkoism, cubical atoms, plum pudding model, caloric theory, phlogiston theory, vitalism, classical elements
• Scientific misconduct: Climategate, Jan Hendrik Schön, Leo Paquette, plagiarism
• Pseudoscience