The Epistemology of Science

Abstract

Science asserts an epistemically privileged role among our attempts to grasp the world around and within us. This assertion is based on the empirical support which mature scientific theories garner and on the systematic and methodical way in which they do this. To understand this relation between evidence and theory is the ambition of theories of ‘confirmation’. This seminar attempts to survey a few of these, to analyze what ‘evidence’ is, and to enter various recent philosophical debates concerning some types of experiments and their epistemic status in various fields of scientific enquiry.