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Former good articlePhilosophy of science was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
November 1, 2015Good article nomineeListed
July 28, 2023Good article reassessmentDelisted
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on January 10, 2016.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that distinguishing science from non-science is an unsolved problem in the philosophy of science, so an "I know it when I see it" standard is sometimes used to recognize pseudoscience?
Current status: Delisted good article

Relational frame theory

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This paragraph on philosophy of psychology seems out of place to me. It would appear to be a niche issue with adherents among a small contingent of psychotherapists, and is not warranted on the general philosophy of science page. It is difficult to follow and is not referenced.

A notable[by whom?] recent development in Philosophy of Psychology is Functional Contextualism or Contextual Behavioural Science (CBS). Functional Contextualism is a modern philosophy of science rooted in philosophical pragmatism and contextualism[citation needed]. It is most actively developed in behavioral science in general, the field of behavior analysis, and contextual behavioral science in particular (see the entry for the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science)[citation needed]. Functional contextualism serves as the basis of a theory of language known as relational frame theory[1] and its most prominent application, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).[2] It is an extension and contextualistic interpretation of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism first delineated by Steven C. Hayes which emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events (including thoughts, feelings, and behaviors) with precision, scope, and depth, by focusing on manipulable variables in their context.[citation needed]

Perhaps editors on this page prefer to have a long article with many niche components. But I thought I'd flag it and, depending on responses, relegate it to a more specialized page. Vrie0006 (talk) 19:37, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Article issues and classification.

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Greetings. I didn't look at the article's history but this article fails the B-class criteria #1 with "citation needed" tags from 2017 and 2018. There are unsourced sentences and paragraphs and added unsourced sentences after an inline citation. There are also "weasel-worded phrases from October 2017" and 2019. -- Otr500 (talk) 07:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GA Reassessment

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · WatchWatch article reassessment pageMost recent review
Result: Delist per consensus. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 08:44, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GA from 2015. There looks to be quite a lot of uncited material in the article which large chunks just with no citations. Onegreatjoke (talk) 23:16, 21 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delist - complete lack of adequate sourcing, not comprehensive, mostly WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. GA criteria 2abc,3ab,4
  • The history section is mostly factually inaccurate, deficient of even the most important names and details, and should be rewritten entirely.
    • The claim the philosophy of science begins with Aristotle is both dubious and only cites... Aristotle himself! There are many historical figures you could consider the first "proto-philosopher-of-science" but the actual formal discipline originates in the 19th century so a lack of secondary citations prior to that is patently unacceptable.
    • The modern section seems to be mostly WP:OR and focuses on otherwise well-known names in philosophy, again with mostly primary sources cited, and it doesn't even mention August Comte, Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem who are generally the most influential modern originators of Philosophy of science.
    • The logical positivism section mostly focuses on the 1930s and implies that Wittgenstein somehow inspired positivism, despite this being chronologically impossible, as logical positivism originated with Comte. None of the important claims made in that section are cited whatsoever, probably WP:OR.
    • Karl Popper, despite being mentioned elsewhere, is completely absent from the history section despite arguably being the most famous philosopher of science of the entire century.
    • I'm not sure Thomas Kuhn's section makes sense if you don't already know what a paradigm shift is, and there's only a single non-primary citation.
  • The "Continental philosophy" section makes a variety of dubious claims about the lack of relevance of philosophy of science within that tradition, despite many continental philosophers of science (even those mentioned in that section!) that are in other parts of the article. Reads like a WP:SOAPBOX written by someone with negative associations with the tradition but little knowledge.
  • The section on reductionism doesn't tell you what reductionism in philosophy of science is, or explain the concept of a hierarchy of sciences (biology is just appied chem, etc..) at all, and then apparently talks about a different, mostly unrelated kind of reductionism in philosophy of mind, invoking Dan Dennett.
  • The WP:SPINOUTs to particular sciences are weakly cited, which can probably be fortified by citations in those respective articles, but I haven't compared them side-by-side to determine if they agree.
  • I mostly only skimmed the other sections, but that's not an endorsement of their content, I just think this is probably enough to work with for now.
This is, admittedly, a very broad topic that's difficult to write a comprehensive article on, but we're not dealing with anything close to that here. At a bare minimum some WP:HQRS that deal with the entire topic of Philosophy of Science as a whole should be consulted, in order to build an outline that can be planned around, the current article is mostly disorganized hunting and pecking for detached quotes from different Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles and a few other sources, with the broader picture forgotten. - car chasm (talk) 02:15, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delist - per the analysis by Carchasm. Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 16:13, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

does Bayesian interpretation of Science make sense here?

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It is arguable that science operates like a Bayesian process. Although I am not sure about how deep the phil literature about bayes and science goes. 103.171.118.111 (talk) 15:51, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See Bayesian inference. Remsense 16:15, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]