Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Nature of Science, and Other Essays
This book is intended as a collection of five essays in the general area of logic and mathematics as applied to science, composed, at various times, during the course of the past decade. The develop ment of the methods and results of natural science is possibly the most significant intellectual contribution of modern western civili zation to the galaxy of man's supreme achievements. I use the term natural science in its widest sense, including all theoretical knowl edge which cannot by definition be included under the category of the divine sciences, and which comprehends knowledge both dis covered by the application of special scientific procedures and based on common sense in everyday life. In the same way the expression language of science is meant here to refer to the language which contains all statements, i.e., theoretical sentences, in contradistinction to emotional expressions, commands, etc., used for scientific purposes in everyday life. What is usually called science I take to be a more systematic continuation of those activities which we carry out in everyday life in order to learn more about the world around us.
As in my earlier book Truth and Meaning, I have not distin guished between any special logic of the empirical sciences and logic in general, since I doubt if any such differentiation really exists. I have taken logic as the name of the discipline which ana lyzes the meaning of the concepts common to all the sciences, and establishes the general laws governing the concepts. But I do recog nize two chief parts of the analysis of linguistic expressions in science. Scientific investigation may be restricted to the forms of_ the linguistic expressions involved and their relation to objects out side of language. An investigation of this type comes within the field of logical syntax, is restricted to formal analysis and abstracts from designation. In the second case, an investigation may not be restricted to formal analysis, but may take designation into con sideration. An investigation of this type comes within the field of semantics, and includes the semantical analysis of the designationof expressions. It will be obvious that this second part of scientific analysis is considerably broader than the first. A further distinction should be made between formal science and empirical science. Formal science consists of analytic statements established by logic and mathematics; empirical science consists of synthetic statements established in the different fields of factual knowledge.
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