Philosophy of science

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 172. Chapters: Science of morality, Relationship between religion and science, Pragmatism, Occam's razor, Metaphysical naturalism, Philosophy of artificial intelligence, Causality, Determinism, Vitalism, Positivism, Engineering, Neurophilosophy, Logical positivism, Scientific theory, Impact evaluation, Atomism, Timeline of scientific thought, Statistical inference, Inquiry, Rhetoric of science, Nature (philosophy), Two-stage model of free will, Physics (Aristotle), Vienna Circle, Commensurability (philosophy of science), Antiscience, Holism, Classification of the sciences (Peirce), Validity (statistics), Bayesian probability, Demarcation problem. Excerpt: Science of morality can refer to a number of ethically naturalistic views. In meta-ethics, ethical naturalism bases morality on rational and empirical consideration of the natural world. This position has become increasingly popular among philosophers in the last three decades. The idea of a science of morality has been explored by writers like Joseph Daleiden in The Science of Morality: The Individual, Community, and Future Generations or more recently by neuroscientist Sam Harris in the 2010 book The Moral Landscape. Harris' science of morality suggests that scientists using empirical knowledge, especially neuropsychology and metaphysical naturalism, in combination with axiomatic values as "first principles", would be able to outline a universal basis for morality. Harris and Daleiden chiefly argue that society should consider normative ethics to be a domain of science whose purpose amounts to the pursuit of flourishing (well-being). They add that "science" should not be so narrowly defined as to exclude important roles for any academic disciplines which base their conclusions on the weight of empirical evidence. Ayn Rand also proposed in Objectivism an ethics based on reason and reality. These ideas have not seen widespread acceptance by the scientific community, have been disputed by philosophers, and continues to generate public controversy - although they have also gained some support (e.g. Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and other proponents). Patricia Churchland sometimes refers to a neuroscience of morality in relation to her book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. The term "science of morality" is also sometimes used for the description of moral systems in different cultures or species. For a collection of the hypotheses of how moral intuitions are thought by some to have evolved and emerged, see moral psychology and the evolution of morality. The idea of a normative science of morality has met with many criticisms. These critics incl