Reasoning in physics

The way in which philosophers have thought about the scientific method and the nature of good scientific reasoning over the last few centuries has been consistently and heavily influenced by the examples set by physics. The astounding achievements of 19th and 20th century physics demonstrated that physicists had successfully identified methodologies and reasoning patterns that were uniquely well suited to discovering fundamental truths about the natural world. Inspired by this success, generations of philosophers set themselves the goal of taxonomising, codifying, formalising and evaluating these reasoning patterns. Many will concede that this has been a tremendously fruitful exercise that has served both to illuminate characteristic methodological and epistemological features of the physical sciences, and to inform the way that philosophers think about the epistemic ideals served by science more generally.publishe