Science - More to know
Science is the field of giving rigorous answers, but ironically the definition of "science" is itself not rigorous. The field of "philosophy of science" is dedicated to trying to give an answer to the question.
In school, they teach you about the scientific method: hypothesize, experiment, revise. They don't teach you (generally) about the next step, publication. Science is a human enterprise, conducted by fallible human beings, and for something to be science it has to be reviewed by other scientists. This is obviously recursive and self-swallowing, not just in that it leaves open the "base case" of who is a scientist, but also in that peers who review the science are themselves human. In that sense, science is itself as much art as science.
And yet it muddles along. We wouldn't be bothering to define science except that it's useful. There's a lot of things that are clearly "science" and other things that are clearly "not science", and there's not a lot of controversy about that. The peer review process is Good Enough.
But that's not Good Enough for those who want a rigorous definition of science, and that opens a massive epistemological can of worms. You'd really like a definition that says, "Chemistry is science, phrenology is not", but it turns out to be harder than you'd think. There were great debates in the mid 20th century about whether something had to be "verifiable" (subject to an experiment that would confirm it) or "falsifiable" (subject to an experiment that could prove it false). Both the verificationists (Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists) and the falsificationists (Karl Popper) are subject to cases where their definitions either exclude a real science or include something widely considered pseudoscience.
Then along comes Thomas Kuhn, who kind of swept both away with his theory of paradigm shift, moving away from science as an epistemological field to a more human enterprise. He distinguishes between "normal" science, done in the current paradigm, and revolutions, which throw out the paradigm.
If you ask most scientists, they'll see their work in falsificationist terms, and that works well during both normal science and some revolutions. Recent revolutions, such as quantum mechanics, have forced scientists to reconsider exactly what it means for something to be verified, since QM experiments are so fiendishly counterintuitive.
I've given only the barest outline of the debates, which are far more in-depth and complicated than I've given here. It's a fascinating field, though, one that most elderly scientists end up turning their thoughts to at one time or another.
In school, they teach you about the scientific method: hypothesize, experiment, revise. They don't teach you (generally) about the next step, publication. Science is a human enterprise, conducted by fallible human beings, and for something to be science it has to be reviewed by other scientists. This is obviously recursive and self-swallowing, not just in that it leaves open the "base case" of who is a scientist, but also in that peers who review the science are themselves human. In that sense, science is itself as much art as science.
And yet it muddles along. We wouldn't be bothering to define science except that it's useful. There's a lot of things that are clearly "science" and other things that are clearly "not science", and there's not a lot of controversy about that. The peer review process is Good Enough.
But that's not Good Enough for those who want a rigorous definition of science, and that opens a massive epistemological can of worms. You'd really like a definition that says, "Chemistry is science, phrenology is not", but it turns out to be harder than you'd think. There were great debates in the mid 20th century about whether something had to be "verifiable" (subject to an experiment that would confirm it) or "falsifiable" (subject to an experiment that could prove it false). Both the verificationists (Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists) and the falsificationists (Karl Popper) are subject to cases where their definitions either exclude a real science or include something widely considered pseudoscience.
Then along comes Thomas Kuhn, who kind of swept both away with his theory of paradigm shift, moving away from science as an epistemological field to a more human enterprise. He distinguishes between "normal" science, done in the current paradigm, and revolutions, which throw out the paradigm.
If you ask most scientists, they'll see their work in falsificationist terms, and that works well during both normal science and some revolutions. Recent revolutions, such as quantum mechanics, have forced scientists to reconsider exactly what it means for something to be verified, since QM experiments are so fiendishly counterintuitive.
I've given only the barest outline of the debates, which are far more in-depth and complicated than I've given here. It's a fascinating field, though, one that most elderly scientists end up turning their thoughts to at one time or another.
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