How Philosophy and Science Relate to Knowledge

The disciplines of philosophy and science are both rational pursuits. Each, however, goes about pursuing knowledge in totally different ways. Philosophy relies primarily on strict logic and analytical thinking. It is somewhat like mathematics, except that it uses words. Science uses experimentation and inference to arrive at conclusions and then test them. Each approach has particular strengths and particular weaknesses.

I believe philosophy has a clearer understanding of knowledge than science does. In my opinion, science has a tendency to abuse the word "know" where philosophy does not. There is an entire discipline in philosophy called epistemology which studies the nature of knowledge and tries to understand how we know what we know. The best definition of knowledge I ever came across in philosophy was "the unthinkability of mistake." Basically, one is in a state of knowing, when one finds error to be unthinkable. Statements such as "I am in pain" would qualify as knowledge, as would many mathematical statements. As a general rule, the sciences, such as physics, do not provide us with such strong knowledge. For example, the law of energy conservation which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed does not constitute knowledge. Why? There are a number of reasons. First, it is conceivable that we may eventually discover that it simply does not hold. Perhaps, energy is created or destroyed in amounts that are undetectable to our instruments. Could we really detect something like 10^-100 joule? Currently, I don't think we can. Additionally, the law of energy conservation (as well as the rest of science) rests on the assumption that the future will resemble the past. It is conceivable that in the future the laws of science will change.