Comparative Philosophy of Science through the Lens of Science Textbooks

This paper analyzes how scientific method, theory, and hypothesis are portrayed in introductory, college science textbooks across the natural and social sciences. While philosophers of science have long debated these concepts, they have given little attention to how they are presented in educational materials. Building on Blachowicz (2009) and drawing on the turn to practice in philosophy of science, we examine textbooks as artifacts of disciplinary self-presentation, offering a comparative study that systematically incorporates the social sciences alongside the natural sciences. Analyzing 53 textbooks across eleven disciplines, we identify three broad patterns in their conceptions of scientific inquiry. First, textbooks in both domains typically present a simplified empiricist account of scientific reasoning, emphasizing hypothesis testing and falsification while giving little attention to theoretical virtues, background assumptions, auxiliary hypotheses, and non-epistemic values. Second, important differences appear both across and within domains: social science textbooks more frequently acknowledge methodological and ethical restrictions and a wider range of research approaches, and they display greater variation in their models of scientific inquiry. Third, textbooks rarely situate scientific inquiry within explicit philosophical frameworks; even when particular frameworks—most notably a simplified empiricism—are suggested, they remain implicit, with inquiry presented primarily in procedural terms. These findings extend philosophical work on scientific practices by examining educational contexts in which the natural and social sciences explicitly offer conceptions of scientific inquiry, while opening up underexplored empirical questions about how such framings may help to shape scientific research practices and public understanding of science.