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The subfield of philosophy that treats fundamental questions pertaining to science. What is science, as contrasted with technological innovation? What are its objectives and methods? Are there aims or goals that are proprietary to science—aims and goals that belong in the first instance to the scientific enterprise, even if they do not belong to any particular individual engaging in the enterprise? Would the methods of the science with which we are familiar be equally successful if the world were quite different? Does science make genuine progress, and if so how? What kind of a world does science as we know it testify to? Is it a world of order or one of chaos? If it is a world of order, how can we understand that order? Should we understand it in terms of laws, akin to those we devise for the sake of regulating our various community interactions and undertakings? And if not in terms of laws like these, then what kinds of laws should we think of science as revealing? Science, in our present era, is divided into specialties. How do specialties originate and evolve? How are the subject matters of diverse scientific specialties related? These questions are as urgent today as they were in the days of Aristotle, who originated the first theory of science, as well as engaged in some of the very earliest scientific inquiries and defined the very first disciplinary boundaries. 

 
Aristotle's theory of science

Aristotle's theory of knowledge and his theory of science were the same. He held that intellectual inquiry—inquiry for its own sake—falls into natural categories that today we might refer to as disciplines, and that these disciplines are as different from each other as they are from common sense. Aristotle insisted that standards of inquiry differ by discipline. For example, the standards of proof and evidence in logic and mathematics should not be applied to the study of nature, or to politics. Aristotle said that common sense is not knowledge because common sense has no standards of inquiry. It is not a discipline. It is a practical activity, as contrasted with scientific or disciplinary life. Knowledge, as contrasted with common sense, is relatively rare because it is the product (as the target or goal) of scientific inquiry—a relative newcomer on the stage of natural history. Science is common only conditionally—common only to the same extent that hard-won fruits of scientific inquiry are transmitted or disseminated without barriers. If science were never invented, there could be no knowledge, however piecemeal—just abject common sense.
Aristotle's theory of science deserves special attention, if only for its contrariety with a certain current in our present culture. Science, as we know it, has come under attack in numerous quarters, some of them academic. The grounds for criticism most heavily subscribed to is the charge that science is not—and could never be—either as objective or as disinterested as it purports to be. The charge is that science—or, more precisely, scientists—do not aim at truth. Instead, science is just one more social institution entangled in the usual power struggles that characterize any scheme of social arrangements. It is both a player in the familiar political drama and a convenient host or node for other such players, and so it is not deserving of the authority it routinely enjoys. This contemporary conception of scientific endeavors contrasts with Aristotle's conception in that it does not acknowledge science as an enterprise with a life and reach of its own—a pull and momentum largely independent of the forces exerted by the scientists who practice it. Thus this more contemporary perspective does not acknowledge (whereas by contrast Aristotle did) that science, as an enterprise, comprises goals and standards far broader and richer than the lives and reaches, goals, and standards of the scientists who enter into it.  
 
Pragmatism

The dominant conception of science among academics today—the conception we just contrasted with Aristotle's—draws heavily on the philosophical doctrine of pragmatism. Classical philosophical pragmatism was an American phenomenon. It originated in the scholarship of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and lives on today in the intellectual lineages of Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. Many of the themes originated and advanced today by these Anglo-American philosophers now run like golden threads through the doctrines of numerous thinkers of the European continent—“deconstructionists” or “constructivists” as they are known. (Widely read, among those writing in that tradition today, are Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and later writings of Richard Rorty.) Fundamental to classical pragmatism is its commitment, ironically, to Darwinism in the form of a doctrine that the favorable designation of “knowledge” should fall to beliefs in human history that happen to have been recruited for overcoming obstacles to the satisfaction of human needs or wants. The name of “science” therefore refers to those beliefs or attitudes that serve to confer upon certain organisms in the lineage of Homo sapiens an evolutionary advantage. It emphatically does not refer to beliefs purporting to portray the world “as it really is,” for how could a species have acquired the ability to represent the universe—especially the universe as it really is, as opposed to how it is usefully described, relative to the particular needs of members of that species? Pragmatists today are legion and diverse, and are found in all areas of the academy, as well as in all areas of philosophical inquiry. Many of them reject the original doctrine of classical pragmatism, according to which science does not seek to portray the world as it is. Still, uniting pragmatists is the idea that science is “natural” in the sense that it is continuous with common sense, and hence that science serves each human organism—to the extent it serves at all—in the way that a bat's wing serves the bat, or (perhaps more aptly) in the way that a political institution might serve those in a position to benefit from it.
 
Origins of science

These fundamentally opposing ideas—Aristotle's original idea on one side and the pragmatists' uniting idea on the other—lie at the foundations of the raging controversy today known as the “science wars.” While not all pragmatists oppose the authoritative—or at least favorable—status that science has enjoyed in recent history, they agree with those who do so oppose it on the matter of the natural history of science. Those who side with Aristotle—who view science as exerting a special force over its own history, a drive to the truth—need to present a contrary natural history. We await that history, according to which science is a development in the natural order, but in which science falls into a different category from common sense. Such a history will present science quite differently. Unlike the bat's wing, which serves the bat whose wing it is, science (according to this still-awaited account) does not serve directly the interests of those who further it. This long-awaited account must present science as an entity susceptible also of a natural history, distinct from the natural history of the species Homo sapiens, and distinct as well from the natural history of technology (which, as has recently been shown by Jared Diamond, has a natural history that is firmly entangled with the natural history of our species and the local conditions under which each of its societies has had to face).
While we await the outcome of these debates on the evolutionary origins of science, the field of philosophy of science continues to debate the questions with which the field, as a subspecialty in philosophy, first came to life: What is a scientific explanation? What is a law of nature? What is causality that even the newborn is capable of recognizing it on the ground? And how are causal regularities related to the laws of nature? How do we attain knowledge of these laws (if they exist) by which nature is governed? And how are the laws of, say, biology related to the laws of physics? Are there natural laws that govern the human social sphere? Each of these questions opens out onto an area of academic inquiry in which philosophical methods interact today with the products of science themselves, and the outcome is very often a wealth of new and exciting philosophical and empirical questions. One illustration of this phenomenon pertains to research on the topic of reason—which is at such a premium in very science itself. In Renaissance times, the laws governing reasoning—the laws of right thinking, as René Descartes referred to them, by which we entertain hypotheses regarding the nature of the natural world—were not thought to be of an empirical nature: no amount of laboratory research, it was thought, could bear upon how to think correctly. But as debate on the rules of right thinking has advanced, this position is increasingly under pressure to give way to the idea that economy is a desideratum, even in thought; and since what counts as economical depends upon what resources are available to the thinking entity, the facts pertaining to the conditions of evolution will have a great deal of bearing upon “right reason.” And so the findings of cognitive psychologists, and even more profoundly evolutionary psychologists, will surely bear upon the question of what counts as right reason. And so a new tangle of questions is revealed, pertaining to how specifically the findings of empirical science ought to bear upon that original question of right reason, formerly thought to belong exclusively to the philosopher's private preserve. 

 
Scientific progress

Science is a relative newcomer on the evolutionary scene, while technological innovation is considerably older. What is perhaps indisputable is that science grew up alongside philosophy. It responded favorably to the ministrations of those cultures that promoted and protected arenas (however exclusive of women, foreigners, and the underclasses) for disputation of ideas. The concept of an open society plays a large role in the philosophies of the most important twentieth-century figures in the philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Science requires an integrated and highly interactive community. No individual thinker can attain the vision for scientific innovation unless he or she will submit to standing upon the shoulders of those giants who came before—and this is increasingly true as history marches forward. And so we are left with a tension between innovation and deference: a culture of disputation is the most fertile ground for science; but no long-term scientific enterprise can flourish without accumulation of insight. In the face of these facts, the questions of how exactly science makes progress—still a central open question in the philosophy of science—becomes more urgent than ever.
The traditional cumulative conception of scientific knowledge (that scientific knowledge grows simply through accumulation or accretion), accepted without debate up until the nineteenth century, was effectively challenged in the twentieth century by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, in quite similar ways. They argued convincingly that the foundations of scientific thinking (sometimes discussed as the logic of science, or the rationality of science) is a logic of disputation—as Popper put it, a logic of conjectures and refutations, a logic of challenge and reply. No scientific hypothesis is immune to challenge. And so, far from being a predominantly antiquarian exercise in maintaining old knowledge and increasing it when possible, the primary scientific exercise is better characterized as disputation of old orthodoxy and proposals for its replacement with a challenger, when the challenger can stand up to further challenges.  See also: Hypothesis
The cumulative view of scientific progress, still quite common today, was an important ingredient in the optimism of the eighteenth-century enlightenment thinkers—Frederick Hegel and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But if (as philosophers currently believe) science does not make progress in this straightforward way, is there any reason to think that human society itself can be progressive? In what sense can science—as distinct from mere technological innovation—be part of the solution to the problems faced by human societies today? What can science bring to the negotiation table when the high stakes associated with public policies crafted in the twenty-first century and beyond are involved? Can science help us understand ourselves and our impact upon our fragile planet? And perhaps most importantly, can science help us craft policies and polities that will effectively safeguard the future of the Earth and the diversity of its life. These are now, as they have always been, open questions for philosophers of science.

Mariam Thalos
 
Bibliography

M. Curd and J. Cover (eds.), Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, W. W. Norton, 1998
C. G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science, Prentice Hall, 1966
P. Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2003
H. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2002
P. Machamer and M. Silberstein (eds.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, 2002
 
Additional Readings

Scientific Progress: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 

Mariam Thalos, "Philosophy of science", in AccessScience@McGraw-Hill