Cat (2014)

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Cat, Jordi. (2014) Unity of Science. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-unity/.

Title Unity of Science
Resource Type collection article
Author(s) Jordi Cat
Year 2014
URL http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-unity/
Collection Zalta (Ed.) (2016)

Abstract

The topic of unity in the sciences includes the following questions: Is there one privileged, most basic kind of material, and if not, how are the different kinds of material in the universe related? Can the various natural sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology) be unified into a single overarching theory, and can theories within a single science (e.g., general relativity and quantum theory in physics) be unified? Does the unification of these parts of science involve only matters of fact or are matters of value involved as well? What about matters of method, material, institutional, ethical and other aspects of intellectual cooperation? Moreover, what kinds of unity in the sciences are there, and is unification merely a relation between concepts or terms (i.e., a matter of semantics), or is it also a relation between the theories, people, objects, or objectives that they are part of? And is the relation one of reduction, translation, explanation, logical inference, collaboration or something else?