Science is regarded as interpretation of the world, gain in knowledge, knowledge acquisition and reproduction, as an attempt to describe the world to systematically and methodically, using models to explain, to make predictions. The result is knowledge, motivated by research, handed down through teaching and literature.

The origins of science lie in its current understanding of Greek antiquity. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle saw it as the basis rationally based knowledge. Even in the 18th Century, there was no separation between philosophy and science in the 19th Century was replaced by a term of begründungsorientierte science methods and standards-science understanding.

A clear agreement on the core issue of what to do science is not to this day. Many scientific theories in trying to formalize the characteristics of scientific knowledge, scientific methodology, the exploration of scientific progress, go into the question of whether science is a form of truth or whether scientific knowledge can only be constructed solely pragmatic. Sun represents the position of scientific realism, scientific theories treat objects that exist in reality, the science see it as an approximation to the truth. The structural realism to follow to describe the structure of science with the truth, but not their content. Entity realism does not believe in the existence of all objects in a particular theory. Only those are nonexistent, which the observer show a cause-effect relationship. A similar position is occupied by the positivism only accepts evidence and findings from method-observation. Every general truth claim is adverse, defined conventionalism of science as a neutral and pragmatic description of the world, is tightly focused on the overall context. In close relationship to conventionalism and instrumentalism is historicism. He believes science is the basic positions of the historical development of theories of knowledge, traditions and paradigms. Contrary to allowing the Realtivismus not to compare rates of one paradigm with that of another. The concept of truth refers only to a particular paradigm.

Science is divided at different levels in many areas. At the level of the subject is the division into science and humanities, at the level of empirical method in empirical sciences, in axiomatic rational sciences and humanities. The scientific activity fell in recent decades, again and again because of the environmental, estimated, heavy damage from the scientific and technically oriented civilization critique.

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