What's the status of the so-called "scientific method" among philosophers of science these days? I realize that there are and have been many different methods employed in what we call or want to call scientific investigation, so I appreciate how misleading the singular term might be. But, with that caveat in mind, in school and elsewhere you hear all about this great 'method' we've established. And certainly scientists take themselves to know and share some activity. To put a finer point on this question, let me sketch what I get the impression this 'method' looks like: 1) It's empirical, that is, it involves observation and experimentation. 2) The scientist makes some initial observations, forms a hypothesis, deduces some predictions from it, then designs and performs a "controlled experiment" to "test" them. This experiment is done by attempting to identify variables, some independent, one dependent to ensure (obviously with fallibility) that the appropriate relationship/conditions are being...

I really don't understand what the big deal is with the apparent 'fine tuning' of the constants of the universe, or even if 'fine tuning' is even apparent! The conditions have to be just right for life to emerge, sure, but so what? Conditions have to be just right for many things in the universe to occur, but we don't always suspect an outside agent as responsible for setting them up that way just so they'll happen. Is this the final refuge of the 'god of the gaps' habit the humans tend to fall in to? I also don't get the need for a multiverse theory either. To me it's a bit like saying, because I rolled a six on a die there must be five others each rolling the other possible numbers in order to explain it. Okay, much bigger die....

I've had as good a time as anyone else discussing armchair philosophy based on cosmology and human nature, but now take the position that it would be professional negligence to engage in same without a firm grounding in e.g. particle physics and evolutionary biology. Other than a Dan Dennett (on evolutionary bio side), who are some contemporary philosophers who are exploring this space? For example, I would love to read the extent to which Aristotle survives or thrives in the light of scientific discoveries over the intervening millenia.

If everything that physically exists is indeed the result of primordial coincidence, is there any way of statistically measuring the chances that human beings (in our present state of development and after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution) would be able to comprehend the origin and nature of the universe? In other words, when I think about the organic lump of brain in my head understanding the universe, or anything at all, it seems absurdly unlikely. That lump of tissue seems to me more like a pancreas than than a super-computer, and I have a hard time understanding how organic tissue is able to reach conclusions about the universe or existence.

Science theorises by proposing ideal types and deducing ideal relationships between them. In nature there is no ideal sphere touching an ideal frictionless plane in an ideal single point. Instead of these ideals, nature gives us avalanches. Yet to study real avalanches the theory derived from the unreal ideal is required. Presumably, reality is too chaotic to theorise directly. Does all useful theory depend on ideal types? It does seem usual. Economics creates idealised relational theories from idealised constructs such as homo economicus, market clearing, perfect information and other things which do not and cannot exist in reality. Presumably, this idealisation approach is one reason for the relative success of economics compared with other social sciences. In the natural sciences measurement is also ideal. For example, a temperature noted as 23.59 degrees is not real: the reality will be plus or minus some small amount. The recorded value, like any exact number, is a mathematical...

I read an answer here that said a description says HOW something is while an explanation entails WHY it is that way. If so then how do we determine when something has been explained (if it can be)? For example, I understand that when it rains the ground becomes wet. Why? I don't know the chemistry behind it but water is wet and covers the ground. But some could ask WHY is it wet and not something else to which many would respond "It just is". Is "It just is" the real explanation? Is the real explanation to everything "It is what it is", even though we may not know what IT is?

Why can’t science tell us what morality ‘is’? In the trivial sense, science can certainly catalog the diversity, commonalities, and contradictions of cultural moral standards and moral behaviors. But science is very good at teasing out underlying principles. What forbids determining such principles (if any exist) using the normal methods of science? For instance, we might propose an observation like “Almost all moral behaviors are strategies for increasing, on average, the synergistic benefits of cooperation and are unselfish at least in the short term” as an hypothesis about what moral behaviors ‘are’. Then we could evaluate its provisional ‘truth’ as a matter of science by how well this hypothesis meets criteria for 1) explanatory power for the diversity, commonalities, and contradictions of moral standards, 2) explanatory power for puzzles about moral behavior, 3) predictive power for moral intuitions, 4) universality, 5) no contradictions with known facts, and so forth. Of course, provisional ...

What is the correct resolution to the Fermi Paradox? As I understand it, the Fermi Paradox is physicist Enrico Fermi's acute observation of the discrepancy between the apparent high probability that extraterrestrial civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe, and the lack of empirical evidence of their supposed existence. It seems to me, that the Fermi Paradox is not a genuine paradox, as it neither commits self-reference nor leads to infinite regress. Any attempt to resolve this so-called paradox just needs to give an explanation for this discrepancy, but how does that contribute towards resolving the paradox? It seems that even if we were to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, the paradox would still be unresolved, so can there be any wholly satisfactory resolution to this paradox? Perhaps I just have the wrong attitude about it... I'm interested in seeing what other philosophers think about the Fermi Paradox, so that perhaps I may be assisted in developing my own stance on this...

Is it possible for any legitimate science to prove, if not now at least someday, that God indeed exists? Or is Richard Dawkins more intuitively right in saying that "someday we would have to understand the whole of the universe without anymore referring to a supernatural being"?

How to tell bad philosophers from good ones? How to determine the "value" of a philosopher and his work? How can we tell that e.g. Plato, Descartes, Kant or Marx were great philosophers while many around them weren't so great? I'll start with analogy from different field. When we look back at history of science, we (at least in a simplified view) can say that the "good" scientists were those whose predictions about the nature of the world matched the objective reality. In science, what is true, is valuable, and vice versa. Some other criteria could be though of as well. One could say that Newton's and Einstein's theories were regarded valuable because they matched with objective reality AND explained things that weren't explained before AND could be used to build other theories and reasoning on top of them. Now, what about philosophy? One could say that a good philosopher is a philosopher whose argumentation is good, i.e. convincing. But shouldn't in this case many lawyers be regarded as great...