Can anybody help me to explain what does it mean for science to be logically dependent on philosophy?

Answer 1

My explanation would be if phylosophy tells science what direction to take. If phylosophy says it is pointless then you'll stop trying to do science.

This was taken to extreme in Dark Ages, when science was pretty much banned by current phylosophy of the time. Real scientific theories where thrown away and repalced by something else. It was known in the Antient times that the world is round. Yet, much later, Copernicus had to be burned alive for his scientific views. Everyone was running around tryign to convert dirt into gold rather than doing real science.

Answer 2

Science depends on philosophy because philosophy gives answers to 2 sets of questions: 1) questions that science cannot answer (permanently or temporarily), 2) why the first set of questions cannot be answered by science. science is a subject to be answered in philosophy. science predicts what will happen from certain laws or assume facts and then seek to prove them however philosophy has no assumptions you must define existence and analyse it. science discovers many things and develops within time but all of these inventions are only proved experimentally so philosophy plays an important role to analyse and study what science invents. philosophy provides us with how science answered a certain concept. inaddition, science is divided into many branches such as sociology,psychology...etc. none of these sciences study what is methodology of science and only philosophy does that.

Answer 3

Historically speaking, science developed from a branch of philosophy known as "natural philosophy". Even to this day, science is dependent on making naturalistic assumptions about the way the universe works.

Answer 4

If you ask "what is love?", science cant answer the question because it is not clearly defined what 'what' 'is' and 'love' mean....so the role of philosophy is to ASK a proper question...philosophy has to find out all the flaws in the way a question is worded,structured etc...and ONLY after the question is perfected by philosophy can science find the answer...if all questions were perfect, there would be very little use for philosophy.

Answer 5

Logic is a branch of philosophy and science depends on logic.

Answer 6

Science defines reality only in terms of what has been discovered. Reality is of course, made up of things we have discovered and have not yet discovered. Philosophy attempts to define the parts of reality that are unknown to science; those things that are unproven or unseen but do exist. Thus, science is logically dependent upon philosophy in terms in our attempts of describing true reality.

Answer 7

There's a whole branch of philosophy known as epistemology, which attempts to answer the question what is valid in science, and what is not. The scientific method as we know it today, with trials and errors, was not self-evident to man throughout history, nor is it the only way in which the world can be understood today.
Epistemologists first freed enquiries of knowledge from objects deemed inappropriate. Proofs of the existence of God, are no longer considered an area of scientific knowledge. Immanual Kant is considered one of the milestones in freeing philosophy from such immaterial concepts, and for setting the object of science towards empiral data (that is to say things that can be measured using the senses through the categories of time and space). Empiricism is also important in the sense that it frees science from ideas of pure reason (abstract reasoning).
Put simply, Kant stated the proper objects of science had to be objects in space and time (as opposed to abstract concepts), and what could be observed about them.
More could be said about the historical philosophical roots of science, but that could easily be the subject of a whole book. Suffice it to say it's philosophers who deliniated the proper objects of enquiry for science. (Occam is also important in this field)
Logic is also a branch of philosophy. Scientific theories have to follow the rules of logic. In modern times, philosophers of the anglo-american school, such as Bertran Russell, Frege and, to a certain extent, Wittgenstein have done much work on what could logically be construed as valid, what could not, and what problems could be posed by pure logic and uncertainties of language. They work as grammarians of science; setting the rules of how the discourse of science can be established, if you will.
Basic ideas found in science for the justification of theories all originate from the works of philosophy. The idea of falsifiability (that a scientific theory must have a way to be proven wrong to be valid), Occam's razors or the rule of simplicity (useless entities must be eliminated for a theory to be valid), and many others, have all originated from the works of philosophers and are all considered essential today to the conducting of proper science.

Answer 8

We can't study what we cannot think up.