6 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



recent years. The term "mental philosophy" is still much 

 in vogue in English universities. Many disciplines are even 

 now in the act of breaking away from the mother stem. 

 Cosmological speculations are on the border line between 

 metaphysics and physics; psychology is still in many univer- 

 sities closely allied with philosophy; sociology is only with 

 difficulty distinguishable from social philosophy ; and the so- 

 called normative sciences, ethics, esthetics, science of re- 

 ligion — attempting as they are to apply measurement 

 techniques to the determination of value attitudes — are in 

 the unfortunate position of having been denied philosophical 

 status before they have been granted scientific recognition. 



The generalization of this historical fact is clear. Philos- 

 ophy is progressively losing ground, and the ground which 

 is lost is promptly claimed by science. Philosophy, which 

 once meant the totality of knowledge, now means the residue 

 of knowledge after mathematics, theology, physics, biology, 

 psychology, ethics, esthetics, and still others which only the 

 future can disclose, have broken away and set themselves 

 up on independent bases. Philosophy, which once was the 

 glorification of knowledge, approaches indefinitely near to a 

 position of complete extinction. Science, on the other hand, 

 which was once non-existent, is taking over the field of 

 knowledge and promises soon to occupy the enviable posi- 

 tion which philosophy has been obliged to abandon. 



It is reasonable to expect that no philosopher today would 

 be willing to accept such a conception of the difference be- 

 tween philosophy and science. But it is curious to note 

 that many have, on the basis of this historical accident, 

 attempted to formulate theoretical conceptions of the nature 

 and scope of each of these disciplines in terms of which the 

 opposition may be understood. The assumption is that the 

 gradual encroachment of science upon philosophy must be 

 due to some basic antagonism between them. More funda- 

 mentally, it must be due to some specific advantage which 

 science has over philosophy, either as to its subject matter 

 or as to its methods of approaching nature. Hence the 



