| | Philosophical ideas are not easy to test because they even underlie the very idea of testing. It was philosophers, like Francis Bacon, who advocated testing claims. And not all scientific claims are subject to tests--in astrophysics, for example, or in mathematics and geometry. Reasoning out whether such claims are true, or simply observing the world to find out, must be laid alongside testing as features of the scientific method. (Several scientists, by the way, became philosophers of science--Thomas Kuhn, most famously, as well as members of the Vienna Circle. And there are books in print showing that at the foundations of science lie philosophical ideas.)
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