The main tradition of philosophy of science and technology research

"Philosophy of science" has two expressions in English: philosophy of science and philosophy of science. Although they can all be translated into Chinese "philosophy of science", there are still differences. The former refers to "philosophical theory about science" and the latter refers to "philosophy with scientific nature", so it is also translated as "philosophy of science". What is generally discussed is "philosophy of science", that is, philosophical theory about science, not "philosophy of science". The so-called "philosophy of science" is the study or reflection of scientific phenomena by philosophy, and the "science" here mainly refers to natural science (the works of Popper, lakatos and Kuhn all involve various studies of social science).

Western philosophy has a long history of philosophical research on science, which can be said to have existed since the existence of science, but the truly mature philosophy of science is the product of the 20th century. Generally speaking, philosophy of science studies science, and what we usually call science started from modern science, which was formed around16th century, but it has only a history of more than 400 years. Because only when science is mature to a certain extent will there be a philosophy of science to study it, and it was not until the 20th century that the study of philosophy of science became a relatively independent discipline. Therefore, although the emergence of philosophy of science can be traced back to Aristotle, when we talk about philosophy of science, the first thing that comes to mind is modern philosophy of science. Scientific philosophy is the survival concept brought by natural laws to human beings.

Generally speaking, philosophy of science studies the essence, rationality, research activities, methodology, epistemology, logical structure and development law of science, so it is closely related to many disciplines of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology and logic. Traditional philosophy of science is a part of metaphysics, while modern philosophy of science started from anti-metaphysics, and its first systematic form in the 20th century was logical positivism. In a sense, the philosophy of science of logical positivism has the dual nature of "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of science", because it takes science as the research object of philosophy and tries to make philosophy "scientific". Not a scientific theory, but a scientific tool. However, since then, the development of philosophy of science has undoubtedly exceeded the expectation of logical positivism: philosophers of science no longer pay attention to the purpose of science, but pay attention to the falsifiability of science (Popper), the historicity of science (Kuhn) and even the diversification of science (Faye Abend).

In this respect, the philosophy of science in the 20th century has the same basic characteristics as the western philosophy in the 20th century.