There are concepts that belong to the basic terminology of science but which are not used in everyday scientific work – such as the concepts of natural law and causality. Such concepts touch on the epistemological foundations of science, and thus transcend individual disciplines and presuppose a particular interest, the interest in foundational questions of science, and presumably also special ...

This thesis is an examination of the relevance of the philosophy of science to science policy, focused around an analysis of philosopher Philip Kitcher’s 2001 Science, Truth and Democracy. I consider and draw upon Kitcher’s work from a variety of perspectives. Initially, I use Kitcher’s work to argue for a more democratic approach to nanotechnology policy. The thesis then examines the philosoph...

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or da...

I observe that, as the physics side of the OPERA-anomaly story is apparently unfolding, there can still be motivation for philosophy of science to analyze the six months of madness physicists spent chasing the dream of a new fundamental-physics revolution. I here mainly report data on studies of the OPERA anomaly that could be relevant for analyses from the perspective of phenomenology of philo...

Science can answer a multitude of questions that are beyond the reach of philosophy. Are there questions that philosophy can answer that are beyond the reach of science? And of the questions that science attempts to answer, are there any that philosophy can answer with greater authority? In either case, if there are such questions, they set what we may call philosophical limits of science. I wi...