IB Philosophy 6.1.3 Methodologies of Science Key Definitions

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

The deductive-nomological model, developed by Carl Hempel, explains an event by showing that it follows logically from general laws and specific initial conditions. If the laws and conditions are true, the event to be explained must occur as a deductive consequence.

Induction is the method of reasoning that moves from particular observations to general conclusions, as when repeated instances of a phenomenon lead us to formulate a universal law. Hume famously argued that induction cannot be rationally justified without circularity, since any defence of induction presupposes the very uniformity of nature it seeks to establish, a problem that remains central to the philosophy of science.

in Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, the overarching framework of shared assumptions, methods, and exemplary problems that governs normal scientific practice within a discipline. Paradigms are socially and historically conditioned, and a paradigm shift occurs when anomalies accumulate to the point that the scientific community adopts a radically new framework.

A scientific theory is a systematic, empirically grounded explanation of a range of phenomena, consisting of interconnected hypotheses, laws, and principles that have been tested through observation and experiment.

Unification in the philosophy of science refers to the ideal of combining disparate theories or phenomena under a single, more fundamental explanatory framework, as when Newton unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics under universal gravitation. The drive toward unification is taken by many philosophers to be a hallmark of scientific progress, though others caution that forcing diverse domains into a single theory can obscure important differences.