Political usage

See also: Politicization of science

Many issues damage the relationship of science to the media and the use of science and scientific arguments by politicians. As a very broad generalisation, many politicians seek certainties and facts whilst scientists typically offer probabilities and caveats. However, politicians' ability to be heard in the mass media frequently distorts the scientific understanding by the public. Examples in the United Kingdom include the controversy over the MMR inoculation, and the 1988 forced resignation of a Government Minister, Edwina Currie, for revealing the high probability that battery farmed eggs were contaminated with Salmonella.^[69]
John Horgan, Chris Mooney, and researchers from the US and Canada have described Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods (SCAMs), where an organization or think tank makes it their only goal to cast doubt on supported science because it conflicts with political agendas.^{[70][71][72][73]} Hank Campbell and microbiologist Alex Berezow have described "feel-good fallacies" used in politics, especially on the left, where politicians frame their positions in a way that makes people feel good about supporting certain policies even when scientific evidence shows there is no need to worry or there is no need for dramatic change on current programs.^{[74]: Vol. 78, No. 1. 2–38}

Science and the public

Various activities are developed to facilitate communication between the general public and science/scientists, such as science outreach, public awareness of science, science communication, science festivals, citizen science, science journalism, public science, and popular science. See Science and the public for related concepts.
Science is represented by the 'S' in STEM fields.

Philosophy of science

See also: Philosophy of science

Working scientists usually take for granted a set of basic assumptions that are needed to justify the scientific method: (1) that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers; (2) that this objective reality is governed by natural laws; (3) that these laws can be discovered by means of systematic observation and experimentation.^[15] Philosophy of science seeks a deep understanding of what these underlying assumptions mean and whether they are valid.
The belief that scientific theories should and do represent metaphysical reality is known as realism. It can be contrasted with anti-realism, the view that the success of science does not depend on it being accurate about unobservable entities such as electrons. One form of anti-realism is idealism, the belief that the mind or consciousness is the most basic essence, and that each mind generates its own reality.^{[nb 16]} In an idealistic world view, what is true for one mind need not be true for other minds.

The Sand Reckoner is a work by Archimedes in which he sets out to determine an upper bound for the number of grains of sand that fit into the universe. In order to do this, he had to estimate the size of the universe according to the contemporary model, and invent a way to analyze extremely large numbers.

There are different schools of thought in philosophy of science. The most popular position is empiricism,^{[nb 17]} which holds that knowledge is created by a process involving observation and that scientific theories are the result of generalizations from such observations.^[75] Empiricism generally encompasses inductivism, a position that tries to explain the way general theories can be justified by the finite number of observations humans can make and hence the finite amount of empirical evidence available to confirm scientific theories. This is necessary because the number of predictions those theories make is infinite, which means that they cannot be known from the finite amount of evidence using deductive logic only. Many versions of empiricism exist, with the predominant ones being Bayesianism^[76] and the hypothetico-deductive method.^[77]:p236
Empiricism has stood in contrast to rationalism, the position originally associated with Descartes, which holds that knowledge is created by the human intellect, not by observation.^[77]:p20 Critical rationalism is a contrasting 20th-century approach to science, first defined by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rejected the way that empiricism describes the connection between theory and observation. He claimed that theories are not generated by observation, but that observation is made in the light of theories and that the only way a theory can be affected by observation is when it comes in conflict with it.^{[77]:pp63–7} Popper proposed replacing verifiability with falsifiability as the landmark of scientific theories and replacing induction with falsification as the empirical method.^[77]:p68 Popper further claimed that there is actually only one universal method, not specific to science: the negative method of criticism, trial and error.^[78] It covers all products of the human mind, including science, mathematics, philosophy, and art.^[79]
Another approach, instrumentalism, colloquially termed "shut up and multiply,"^[80] emphasizes the utility of theories as instruments for explaining and predicting phenomena.^[81] It views scientific theories as black boxes with only their input (initial conditions) and output (predictions) being relevant. Consequences, theoretical entities, and logical structure are claimed to be something that should simply be ignored and that scientists shouldn't make a fuss about (see interpretations of quantum mechanics). Close to instrumentalism is constructive empiricism, according to which the main criterion for the success of a scientific theory is whether what it says about observable entities is true.
Paul Feyerabend advanced the idea of epistemological anarchism, which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge and that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules are unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself.^[82] Feyerabend advocates treating science as an ideology alongside others such as religion, magic, and mythology, and considers the dominance of science in society authoritarian and unjustified. He also contended (along with Imre Lakatos)^[discuss] that the demarcation problem of distinguishing science from pseudoscience on objective grounds is not possible and thus fatal to the notion of science running according to fixed, universal rules.^[82] Feyerabend also stated that science does not have evidence for its philosophical precepts, particularly the notion of uniformity of law and process across time and space.^[83]
Finally, another approach often cited in debates of scientific skepticism against controversial movements like "creation science" is methodological naturalism. Its main point is that a difference between natural and supernatural explanations should be made and that science should be restricted methodologically to natural explanations.^{[nb 18]} That the restriction is merely methodological (rather than ontological) means that science should not consider supernatural explanations itself, but should not claim them to be wrong either. Instead, supernatural explanations should be left a matter of personal belief outside the scope of science. Methodological naturalism maintains that proper science requires strict adherence to empirical study and independent verification as a process for properly developing and evaluating explanations for observable phenomena.^[84] The absence of these standards, arguments from authority, biased observational studies and other common fallacies are frequently cited by supporters of methodological naturalism as characteristic of the non-science they criticize.