Understanding the word 'scientific', first off.
Historically, I think that 'science' is derived from the Latin for 'knowledge'. So any complex or organized body of knowledge came to be thought of as being a 'science'. People spoke of the science of cooking. Theology was a science.
Starting with the dictionary will always seem a good move to me.
First off, it's natural science. It addresses events in the physical world. That distinguishes it from theology.
As you notice yourself, mathematics seems to be a science and doesn't seem to be about the natural world. So, "natural" appears to be irrelevant here.
That naturalism leads to empiricism, to the expectation that scientific knowledge is to be obtained through the senses and not through revelation, private intuition or mysticism.
Again, most people think of mathematics as not an empirical science, so that should make empiricism irrelevant, too, at least for most people, assuming they would be rational people.
Still, me, I think of mathematics as properly empirical, so I'm pleased to accept empirical as necessary to scientific research.
And scientific knowledge in our new sense needs to be objective as opposed to subjective. Scientific knowledge has to be more than a matter of individual psychology, true-for-me-alone. It has to be true-for-everyone, true of the reality in which we all find ourselves.
Good to me, at least as you define here what is objective.
However, you've moved from talking about scientist research, the topic at hand, to talking about scientific knowledge. That's obviously two very different things.
This is where the scientific repeatability and confirmation stuff seems to be most relevant. ('Why should I believe that? Well, look for yourself.')
Repeatability seems indeed necessary to the validation of any theory as a scientific one. However, we're talking here about scientific
research, not scientific knowledge, and I don't see that Einstein wasn't doing proper scientific research with General Relativity well before the first actual observation confirming it in 1917, I think, and therefore well before any possibility of repetition. So, it has to be observable and repeatability of observation
in principle rather than actual repetition.
And just historically, modern science started with very simple physics, with the kind of events which lent themselves to abstraction in terms of very simple mathematical formulation. So in a way the rise of science was a matter of luck, in that Galileo and company addressed physical problems governed by very simple mathematical principles that the methods they had available could successfully deal with.
Well, that's indeed true for astronomy and physics, but again not true of mathematics, unless you want to discard mathematics as not a science at all, and then why not discard physics as well since it is relies on mathematics.
Of course things have gotten tremendously more complicated since then...
More complicated measurement devices and apparatuses but also much more mathematics...
Mathematics has always been a bit of a problem case for natural science. Many people speak of 'mathematical science', but it isn't a natural science and it doesn't seem to be empirical. Its exact nature, epistemology and ontological status remain obscure and controversial. But mathematics remains a 'science by courtesy' one might say, probably because of indispensibility arguments.
You're being fluffy here.
Still, I take mathematics to be an empirical science, so I'm not subjected to any abject contradiction myself.
Biological science isn't really abstract and mathematized in the same way that theoretical physics is (though genomics is inching in the direction of computer science), but it's still indisputably a science. (Probably the most rapidly advancing science at the present time, given all the gene sequencing data flooding in.)
Yes, people who think of biology as not really a science would have a hard time justifying their
opinion.
And there's the so-called "social sciences". (I'm very doubtful about their scientific status.) These seem to have trouble eliminating subjectivity since they depend crucially on people's own subjective attitudes and their understanding of the situations in which they find themselves. So there's (arguably) an ineradicable element of hermeneutics and Verstehen to things like cultural anthropology, perhaps making them more akin to literary theory than to science.
Well, again, we're supposed to be talking of scientific research. Me, I don't have any qualms counting social sciences as proper scientific research.
There's a lot of discussion in the literature about the unity of science. Is science defined by a single method or is it a grab-bag of methods, many specific to specialized sciences, that are used as situations warrant? What is the status of various sciences in relation to each other? Can a science like biology be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics?
Clearly, different sciences need to develop specific methods that can be useful to them given their field of research. Yet, we still count all these different kinds of research using different methods and methodologies as sciences, which again begs the question of what defines scientific research.
Or are there aspects of biology that are emergent somehow, elements that one wouldn't suspect and couldn't predict by consideration of particle physics alone (or whatever one thinks the most basic level of reality is)? (What is the relation of scientific explanation to that? If we explain something, have we reduced it to something else?)
Well, that seems to be a problem only for people adopting criteria too narrow for distinguishing science from non-science. It's up to you to make up your mind about that and if you do, to argue it rationally...
And the movement of each particle in a plasma, gas or liquid (and solid as well if you had all the time in the world to observed it) most probably depends on the movement of all other particles. So, understanding these so-called emergent properties is as much about understanding the movement of each particle as it is about understanding the movement of the whole. As long as you can't predict the whole, you can't predict what each particle is doing, and therefore can't be said to understand the actual movement even of simple particles. All you do is
assume the basic model applies. Not quite observation and repeatability, then.
And of most interest to Sciforums, there's the demarcation problem. Is there some quality of modern science that sets it apart from all other human endeavors and arguably makes it much more authoritative? Can a clear line be drawn between 'science' and 'pseudoscience'?
Why should that be "modern" science? You haven't demonstrated modern scientific research is any different from what people did in ancient times, or indeed do today outside what you seem to regard as "modern science".
I'm inclined to say 'no'. My view of science, as suggested above, is rather fuzzy, indistinct and historically contingent. Ultimately, I perceive science as being common sense applied to physical reality, along with a big dose of mathematical abstraction (in physics' case) and lots of effort to keep things objective. That last is basically common sense too, it's simply people saying 'Why should I believe that'? and expecting reasons that will convince the person doing the asking as well as the person giving the answer.
But exactly how mathematical science gets to be objective, then, if objective is a criterion of science and mathematics is a science?
Which inevitably raises questions about expertise and authority in science. (The questions never end.)
Sure, but mathematicians don't seem to have significantly more problems about that than physicists, especially since Quantum Physics was first conceived of, or since "not even wrong" String Theory was first proposed. Remember, we're talking scientific research here, not scientific knowledge.
EB
