Good physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have recently generated a good deal of controversy by expressing disdain about what philosophers do. And the reverse also happens, if less common and more politely phrased. In my first year of graduate school I walked out of a class taught by Nelson Goodman when he contemptuously opined that, “It is well known that scientists have no idea what it is they actually do.” And yet, I would ask any scientist unconvinced of the steepness of the challenges philosophers face to spend an hour trying to explain why science works. Not whether it works—I'll let you assume that science is indeed a route to knowledge about nature—but what it is we do that gains us that knowledge.
We all know the outline of how science is supposed to work. A theory should make definite and unique (to it) predictions that can be...
