Albert Einstein on Philosophy of science

“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. ...A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is... the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

“The conception... of the purely fictitious character of the basic principles of theory was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still far from being the prevailing one. But it continues to gain more and more ground because of the everwidening logical gap between the basic concepts and laws on the one side and the consequences to be correlated with our experiences on the other—a gap which widens progressively with the developing unification of the logical structure, that is with the reduction in the number of the logically independent conceptual elements required for the basis of the whole system.”

“It has often been said... that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? ...it can not be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become as problematic as they are now. ...the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of theoretical foundations; for he... knows best and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for a new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities.”