section_path: Philosophy and discourse/Unificationism
section_name: Unificationism
paragraph_text: Unificationism
  
  Unificationism, in science, was a central tenet of logical positivism. Different logical positivists construed this doctrine in several different ways, e.g. as a reductionist thesis, that the objects investigated by the special sciences reduce to the objects of a common, putatively more basic domain of science, usually thought to be physics; as the thesis that all theories and results of the various sciences can or ought to be expressed in a common language or "universal slang"; or as the thesis that all the special sciences share a common scientific method.
  
  Development of the idea has been troubled by accelerated advancement in technology that has opened up many new ways to look at the world.
  
  The fact that the standards of scientific success shift with time does not only make the philosophy of science difficult; it also raises problems for the public understanding of science. We do not have a fixed scientific method to rally around and defend.