It is vitally crucial for science that the details about the surrounding world and the objects of study be as accurate and as dependable as feasible. For the sake of this, measurements which are the source of this info must be as objective as possible. Prior to the invention of measuring tools (like weights, meter sticks, clocks, etc.) the only source of info offered to humans were their senses (vision, hearing, taste, tactile, sense of heat, sense of gravity, etc.). Simply because human senses differ from individual to person (due to wide variations in personal chemistry, deficiencies, inherited flaws, etc.) there were no objective measurements just before the invention of these tools. The consequence of this was the lack of a rigorous science.
With the advent of exchange of goods, trades, and agricultures there arose a need in such measurements, and science (arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, etc.) based on standardized units of measurements (stadia, pounds, seconds, etc.) was born. To further abstract from unreliable human senses and make measurements more objective, science uses measuring devices (like spectrometers, voltmeters, interferometers, thermocouples, counters, etc.) and lately – computers. In most instances, the less human involvement in the measuring procedure, the more accurate and dependable scientific data are. Currently most measurements are done by a range of mechanical and electronic sensors directly linked to computers—which further reduces the chance of human error/contamination of details. This produced it achievable to achieve astonishing accuracy of contemporary measurements. For example, existing accuracy of measurement of mass is about 10-10, of angles—about 10-9, and of time and length intervals in a lot of circumstances reaches the order of 10-13 – 10-15. This produced feasible to measure, say, the distance to the Moon with sub-centimeter accuracy (see Lunar laser ranging experiment), to measure slight movement of tectonic plates employing GPS system with sub-millimeter accuracy, or even to measure as slight variations in the distance between two mirrors separated by a number of kilometers as 10-18 m—three orders of magnitude much less than the size of a single atomic nucleus—see LIGO.
Yet another question about the objectivity of observations relates to the so referred to as “experimenter’s regress”, as well as to other issues identified from the sociology of scientific understanding: the folks that carry out the observations or experiments constantly have cognitive and social biases that lead them, typically in an unconscious way, to introduce their own interpretations and theories into their description of what they are ‘seeing’. Some of these arguments can be shown to be of a restricted scope, when analyzed from a game-theoretic point of view. (See also “Rhetoric of Science”).
In addition to addressing the general questions concerning science and induction, numerous philosophers of science are occupied by investigating philosophical or foundational problems in specific sciences. The late 20th and early 21st century has observed a rise in the number of practitioners of philosophy of a specific science.
Philosophy of biology deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical problems in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers usually have lengthy been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, and even Kant), philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to developments in biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key suggestions such as the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions as nicely as the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience are also addressed. In the late 90s of the 20th century it became increasingly clear that a new philosophy of biology arises which investigates communication processes inside and between cells, tissues, organs and even organisms of several kingdoms according non-mechanistic and non-reductive strategies such as biosemiotics or the biocommunicative approach.