Understanding what science is

I know nothing about reality.

Three things I think I know about science are:
Science is not about reality; reality is philosophical.
Science is tentative to the extent that it does not correspond precisely to reality.
Science is the art of applying the scientific method; seeking consensus among professionals via the scientific method.

My intention is to understand what science is. Please correct me on my three statements above, or add statements of your own that will help me understand what science is.

 

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I bet you know more about it than you're prepared to admit (like a lot of people).

Really? What would you say the reality of electric power is? The reality of mobile phones? The internet?

Perhaps, but it's precise enough that very small devices can be manufactured on a silicon chip. It's precise enough that rockets can be launched into space and travel quite precise paths, to say, some asteroid or moon orbiting another planet.

In theory, yes. In practice, new ideas often take some time to become accepted, or for a consensus to appear. Sometimes the scientific method isn't clear cut (or isn't precisely defined; actually I think that's true most of the time); experiments can yield results which are biased in favour of expectation.

 

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Didn't you ever encounter the attitude in others that we don't or can't know reality? I have, though the discussions revolve around philosophical matters. I opened the OP with that philosophy more for the reason of making the thread about "what science is", instead of what "reality" is. Making the distinction between science and reality might have been unnecessary, but when starting a new thread you don't know what attitudes will be behind any responses you might get. I suppose I could address some aspect of what I might call reality but I wouldn't expect to get the level of agreement about that as we might have about what is science.

I can appreciate those "realities" as much as anyone, but let me put my statement into a different perspective. When man discovered fire they thought of it as one of the four elements. They still cooked food and kept warm with it. So I will concede that fire is something real, but the reality of what fire is, that is not so obvious and doesn't need to be understood in order to use it.

You are saying that electricity or electromagnetic waves, or electronic technology are real, but are you also saying that science knows the mechanisms of electric and magnetic fields, the relationships between the atoms and molecules, the nature of the sub atomic particles and forces involved, and the cause of the presence of particles and forces to the extent that you would characterize our understanding as corresponding precisely with reality?

Yes, the precision is phenomenal, but which of those things, or what specifically is there in the science that corresponds precisely with reality? No need for anyone to suspect that I am belittling science by trying to understand what it is. I was thinking that there are limits to what we can observe, and if we cannot yet observe the mechanics of the quantum realm, we have to say we know the theory, not the reality. So would you advise me to amend that to say that science is that which we can observe and about which we can have theories about the cause and effect at the quantum level?

That is true, but still, we are talking about the process of applying the scientific method. The ongoing/unceasing effort of the scientific community to resolve the issues of cause and effect to the satisfaction of their peers is an ongoing process which I consider a part of the scientific method.

And even when there is a consensus achieved, the results are still tentative, though some are offended by that concept. Future discoveries can supersede existing theory.

 

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Science is the concerted human effort to understand, or to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding1. It is done through observation of natural phenomena, and/or through experimentation that tries to simulate natural processes under controlled conditions. (There are, of course, more definitions of science.)

Consider some examples. An ecologist observing the territorial behaviors of bluebirds and a geologist examining the distribution of fossils in an outcrop are both scientists making observations in order to find patterns in natural phenomena. They just do it outdoors and thus entertain the general public with their behavior. An astrophysicist photographing distant galaxies and a climatologist sifting data from weather balloons similarly are also scientists making observations, but in more discrete settings.

The examples above are observational science, but there is also experimental science. A chemist observing the rates of one chemical reaction at a variety of temperatures and a nuclear physicist recording the results of bombardment of a particular kind of matter with neutrons are both scientists performing experiments to see what consistent patterns emerge. A biologist observing the reaction of a particular tissue to various stimulants is likewise experimenting to find patterns of behavior. These folks usually do their work in labs and wear impressive white lab coats, which seems to mean they make more money too.

The critical commonality is that all these people are making and recording observations of nature, or of simulations of nature, in order to learn more about how nature, in the broadest sense, works. We'll see below that one of their main goals is to show that old ideas (the ideas of scientists a century ago or perhaps just a year ago) are wrong and that, instead, new ideas may better explain nature.

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122science2.html

 

Don't say "art", it sounds derogatory and isn't really accurate. Science is the PROCESS of applying the scientific method.

 

That was a wealth of information and covered the topic very nicely. I appreciate the link.

 

I see your point and stand corrected.

 

I don't believe that. Do you step in front of speeding cars? Do you eat your bowel movements? Do you walk off cliffs?

Geology is about stones and the evolution of landforms. Should we conclude that stones aren't real?

This is from the 'Oxford Guide to Philosophy' (p787):

'Real' is often used with some opposite term in mind, such as 'ideal' or 'fake'. In these cases, one can infer from 'A is not a real F' that A is not an F at all (one of the things that tempts philosophers to equate 'real' with 'existent'). Hence to contrast 'real' with a term like 'relational' may mislead: from 'A was a relational change' one can infer that A was a change.

If 'reality' is taken to be the sum total of all that is real, then for 'real' we do have to read something like 'existent'.

The Oxford Guide to Philosophy (p. 277) says this about 'existence':

'Existence' a key term in ontology, in one sense refers to the sum total of reality - everything that exists - and in another to the elusive characteristic of being which differentiates real things from fictional ones.

Yes. I think that we can agree that the accounts, explanations and theories that science spins out don't correspond precisely to reality. Today's science probably isn't the last word and it almost certainly can be expanded and improved upon. In a few cases, people might even discover at some time in the future that significant parts of present-day understanding might need to be replaced with something better. So yeah, science is probably always going to be a work in progress.

But it seems to me that there does need to be some correspondence. There needs to be enough to establish reference, so that science is about something and is more than mere fantasy. And there needs to be enough correspondence with how the things referred to behave to account for science's pragmatic successes in experiments, engineering and stuff.

I'm not convinced that there is a single scientific method.

Science uses a variety of methods - observation (whether directly or by means of instruments), description, classification, quantifiable measurements, theoretical reduction, logical deduction, inductive inference, Euclidean-style axiomatization, various forms of statistics, construction of mathematical models, controlling variables, conceptual simplifications, many forms of laboratory experiments, field observations, all kinds of established techniques...

My feeling is that scientists have an abundant methodological tool-kit and that they will pull techniques out as occasions warrant. What justifies the employment of a particular technique in a particular situation are basically logic and common-sense.

I think that science is just an elaboration of the same kind of common sense that we employ in our normal everyday lives.

The word 'science' is derived from the Latin word 'scientia', which basically just means knowledge. Until the 1800s the word 'science' was used to refer to any kind of structured knowledge. Any subject in which skill was required was commonly referred to as a science, so there was a science of cooking, for example. What we think of today as science was more typically called 'natural philosophy'. I believe that it was the British philosopher of science William Whewell who first referred to natural philosophers as 'scientists' in 1840, at a time when science was being increasingly distinguished from philosophy in university curricula, when it was forming its own professional organizations, and so on. So there was a perceived need for a new word and 'science' caught on and has been with us ever since.

Maybe one way to think about what science is, is to trace what historically went into it.

One of the sources of science were the many craft traditions that were found in every pre-modern society. People have been physicians, shipbulders, farmers, architects and blacksmiths since prehistoric times. There's a huge amount of practical trial-end-error lore that went into that.

Ancient Greece produced a new kind of thinker, the philosopher. Philosophers weren't particularly interested in the craftsman's rules-of-thumb, they hoped to discover the timeless unchanging principles that they believed existed beneath the world of ever-changing appearance. The big innovation with the philosophers was logical argument. They entered into controversies where they had to produce persuasive arguments for their positions. The philosophers invented logic as a distinct field of inquiry and mathematics grew dramatically.

Then in the Western Renaissance and in the 1600s particularly, we saw these two historical traditions, the practical rough-and-ready craftsmen and the ivory-tower logical and conceptual theorists, starting to merge together into a single individual. We find the logical theorists paying new attention to specific real-life problems. There was a new interest in both theory and in close observation among the artists of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo DiVinci. Books were written on things like visual perspective, where geometry was drafted into the cause of improving the craft of painting.

The new Renaissance thinkers were given contracts by the princes that patronized them to use mathematics to predict what angle to tilt newly invented cannons so that cannon-balls would fall at desired ranges, in order to produce ballistic tables for the use of army gunners. And that in turn exposed the fact that nobody really knew very much about the flight of cannonballs, about how fast things fell, about whether they accelerated as they did so, about how accelerations were mathematically related to forces, about decomposing motions into vectors, or even about how the older medieval theoretical ideas like impetus really worked in real-life quantifiable terms.

So you start to see the new thinkers doing something new: They didn't just consult the respected ancient authorities like Aristotle (as a medieval thinker would have). We start to see the new-style thinkers experimenting for themselves with dropping things and closely observing what was actually happening when they did so. The new-style thinkers started to observe all manner of familiar things like the motion of pendulums with a brand-new mathematical eye.

And we arrive at the intellectual context that produced Galileo.

 

Yes, this is good stuff!

However one term I miss in the discussion so far is "model". I was always taught that natural science seeks to "model" reality, in an ever more accurate way. This I think may help with some of the contentious comments about reality.

To me, the scientist must believe there is an objective reality out there to model, or he/she would not bother. So, in my view, it can't be all "relative", or in the eye of the beholder, or somehow culturally conditioned, as some sociologists try - perversely - to maintain. But, by implication, a "model" of reality is likely to be an imperfect or partial representation of it.

And in fact we happily use different models for different purposes in science. My favourite example of this is the "arrow-pushing" used by organic chemists to explain reaction mechanisms. Physical chemists are fairly sniffy about this practice, arguing you need to do proper molecular orbital calculations to tell you what really happens to the bonding electrons during a chemical reaction. But of course doing such calculations would be prohibitively slow and difficult for any but the simplest systems. Meanwhile arrow pushing works, so it is used, without too much agonising over the extent to which it accurately represents what happens. So, we have different models for different purposes and so long as both are good predictors of the outcome in their proper contexts, both are scientifically valid, each being a partial model of reality.

 

The empirical or interpersonal world fills your senses all waking hours (dreams make it difficult to escape a memory and imagination engineered version of that external environment even during sleep). It's the assumed "transcendent" counterpart of that extrospective world that is philosophical, and purely speculation that it should be classed as a "world" or "reality" at all. Plato's intellectual forms might have still constituted a structure of some kind, but the metaphysical absolute as a "world" is either joke or metaphor; unconditioned entities would not be dependent upon relations between themselves, causation, etc.

Science simply augments the reality of everyday experience with deeper inventories and explanations. Certain disciplines may deal with hidden things and occurrences, but the latter are still "physical phenomena" if they co-exist in space (even space as abstract description) and were events with temporal locations; and can eventually be connected with something empirical (instrument measurements, outcomes of tests, etc). Theoretical physics doesn't leave behind all the intuitions and categories that perception and understanding conform to and impinge upon a literal absolute or unconditioned circumstance. It is not about either a purely intellectual (lesser to the next) or a completely anoetic reality (again, referring to the latter as a "reality" is a joke; as if what cannot be represented by either appearance or reason / description could ever be the original source for "real"!).

 

I don't think it would set well with most science groupies to know that the inventor of the scientific method was actually a lawyer. Yea! Let's hear it for lawyers!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_jqHEdurHs

 

Yeah, I agree with that. Science is a human activity that results in the production of descriptions, explanations and predictive models of the world around us. Science is kind of a map, and we shouldn't confuse a map of a territory with the territory it maps.

Yes. I'm very much a realist in that sense as well.

I guess that people in different cultures or at different periods of history have employed different concepts to describe the world that surrounds them. There's no end of obsolete scientific theories that could provide examples.

So I'd say that while we do all live in the same world, that world can be described in any number of ways. Those ways are clearly conditioned to historical circumstance.

That being said, I certainly don't want to suggest that all of the alternative ways of describing the world are equally true. Nor would I want to argue that they are only adopted or rejected for Kuhnian-style sociological reasons.

Again, I agree. I guess that science's long-term goal is to make its descriptions, explanations and models as consistent and comprehensive as possible. But until the day when we know everything about everything (we would have to be gods), that's going to be a work-in-progress, always subject to extension and revision.

I believe that kind of thing is fairly common in science. There are examples of what appear to be dramatically different techniques in quantum mechanics producing the same predictions of experimental results. Instrumentalist philosophers of science like to point to that as an argument against scientific realism. They argue that scientific theories are just calculating conveniences that allow us to predict the results of experiments. We shouldn't believe that the theoretical entities posited by the theory, such as electrons, literally exist out there in the world.

I think that's way too strong and I suspect that the vast majority of scientists would agree with me. The recent discovery of Higgs boson seems to generally be interpreted as the verification of something important that really exists in the world (at least for an instant, in CERN's accelerator), as opposed to just another experimental verification of a theoretical calculating scheme that makes use of such concepts.

So science's goal isn't just to generate useful theories. Perhaps even more importantly, science is seeking to produce true theories, theories that actually correspond to reality.

Of course, rather different theories might still retain some use even if they are recognized as not being literally true in all of their particulars, if they allow particular calculations to be made more easily. A great deal of astronomical calculation is still done using the earth as the reference frame, despite astronomers all knowing that the geocentric cosmology isn't the way things are.

 

Art isn't a bad word for what scientists do. At least if we don't read all kind of early 19'th century Romantic connotations into the word.

The thing is, I don't think that there's any single fixed scientific algorithm -- '1. make observations, then 2. turn the crank'. There isn't any crank. Or perhaps more accurately, there will be lots of them, some more useful in some situations, others in others, and probably some that nobody has even thought of yet.

Being a good experimenter really is akin to an art, and some individuals are virtuosos at coaxing their apparatus to produce useful data. The same thing is true, albeit in a more abstract way, for theorists. There's lots of technique involved in science, and oftentimes it isn't obvious which technique is ultimately going to succeed. Knowing when and where to do what, especially if nobody has ever done it before, is the occasion for scientific creativity.

 

No, and you are on the same page with Arfa Brane. I was making a distinction between observing and/or utilizing something real vs. understanding the mechanisms; the cause and effect down to the quantum level, like my example of fire as it was used but not understood by the cavemen. But I am on board with both of you to the extent that we would agree that stones and fire are real. Do you think my distinction is unnecessary in light of the objective of understanding what science is, or does me distinction get me off the hook?

That is helpful and I would equate the stones and fire to real and existent, and still want to make a distinction between understanding the cause and effect that underlie the "existent".

I don't take any exception to any of that, except to point out that fantasy and the supernatural are excluded by the scientific method

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Interesting and well said.

 

The concept of modeling is a good point when it comes to what science is. The evolution of the "current model" of something is evidence of the continued application of the scientific method. Science never rests because there are always new tools, new observations, and new connections between existing theories and hypotheses.

 

I suppose so, though personally I think one can get too pompous about the "scientific method" if one is not careful. It seems to me the way theories evolve (or are occasionally overthrown) and are corroborated or otherwise by observation is actually quite messy and iterative. Nobody in science, in my experience, is ever actually taught something called "the Scientific Method" in a way that enables the student to go out and start applying it. It's not a problem-solving technique like calculus or something in that respect. It seems to me it is more a case of applying common sense, given an implicit critical framework that demands a theory can make predictions that can be verified by observation. One can argue until the cows come home as to whether a theory arises from deduction from observations already made, or by induction, i.e. having an idea that is then put to the test by new observations, or some mix of the two. I'm sure it is both.

 

Modern science and the philosophy of science is primarily left brained. This side of the brain differentiates reality in terms of cause and effect. It also processes language. The right brain is more 3-D or integral and organizes the data of reality in a different way. These may or may not always overlap, properly, which is why we have philosophy.

As an analogy, say I had a large photograph the size of a wall. This is the big picture that contains all the data and is therefore right brained; 3-D. For the left brain, we will zoom in and differentiate a small section of the bigger picture. Within the context of this small section, we can define the details and even the local cause and effect. But we can't infer the context in terms of the largest picture. These can be different.

If I had a large photo and we zoom in on a bird, we can tell what kind of bird, but we can't tell if this is in the city, farm, north or south hemisphere. That needs a larger 3-D context.

In other words, even if a natural phenomena was integrated in 3-D, science using the left brain can't see 3-D context, since that side of the brain is designed by nature to see differential and 2-D. One would need to do science, from the right brain. However, this separates one from the scientific method because it become intuitive, which is not subject to verification. The right brain does not process language so it can also become esoteric; hog wash to left brainers.

The result is philosophy will step in to bridge 2-D and 3-D, since it rules of analysis are more flexible than the philosophy of science. Then science proceeds.

 

Nicely said Wellwisher. And Einstein said creativity, a right brain function, is very important. For him and others, solutions to problem came to them in dreams. It is recommended when we are working on resolving a problem, or writing a paper, we go for a walk and let our brains work things out without our conscious effort.

I am very distressed by the attitude of the science community that seems as dogmatic as the church of old. This prevents people from developing new insights. It reminds me of what William James wrote of German education in 1899. "...Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. ...they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requiste number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant human information on that subject."

This would be education for technology, for military and industrial purpose, and the US adopted this model of education in 1958. It brings us to a mechanical society, and while the people in this science forum have been wonderful, I have passed through several science forums that were so mean spirited, I am reminded of what Charles Sarolea wrote of the Prussians and their effect on Germany. The Prussian influence on Germany and its control of education lead to Nazi, Germany, and that is what I see when people become very dogmatic and intensely focused on being correct and avoiding woo woo pseudo science.

I would say the roaring twenties were roaring because of all the science and innovations from electricity to telephones and gas powered cars, and this all happened before we focused our education on technology for military and industrial purpose. It has been said, if the bridge were not already invented it could not be invented today, because of the change in education. The social ramifications are not pleasant, and what kind of world do we get when we must sell weapons to keep our economy going, and stop manufacturing TV's and vacuums? We need people who think outside of the box. We need to lighten up and be friendly, and trust the world will not be destroyed if someone enjoys exploring something that is not blessed by the science community. You know, we need to be different from the dogmatic church of old.