Bronze-level articleScience

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Revision as of 00:54, 17 October 2010

Part of the series on
Philosophy of
science
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Foundations
Method
Conclusions

Science is the system of acquiring knowledge through use of the scientific method — that is, generating hypotheses and theories through observation and testing. Science is intimately linked with technology; technology is developed by the ideas of science and science is reliant on technology to further its ideas. The goals of science are to learn more about the world and use this knowledge to for the betterment of humankind.

Contents

Categorizing science

Science is divided into broad fields used to categorize the phenomenon being studied, such as biology, chemistry, geology etc. Each of these broader fields is then broken up into finer and finer sub-fields. For example, physics includes the study of light, heat, force, and energy, etc., and these can be further divided into specialisations arriving at a subject such as the electric field. In general, as science is broken down into finer categories, the depth and complexity of the subject increases.

The question of what does and what does not count as science is known as the demarcation problem. What is not science can generally be found in RationalWiki's pseudoscience category.

Success

Science is sometimes very simple; the fact that one of these flasks turned slightly cloudy led to one of the best examples of evolution in action.

Science has been the most spectacularly successful method humankind has invented for the investigation of the material world. As has been mentioned previously, technology and technological advancement is reliant on science; science has produced drugs that cure diseases, the cultivation and distribution of an enormous variety of food, communications and transportation methods that allow us to make contact with others across the world with ease, and computers that have vastly increased our ability to collect, store and analyze information. Less obvious things that come from science are things like ballpoint pens, insulated houses, flushing toilets and the materals and dyes used in modern clothing. By its nature science seeks to form cohesive explanatory frameworks for any information, without clearly drawn limits; this makes it pesky and irritaing to those who would prefer that science would just stop at some arbitrary point so they can comfortably maintain anti-science beliefs and practices.

The anti-science movement

Bonus points if you can identify the science in question.
Image courtesy of http://xkcd.com/

Where it crosses these near invisible boundaries science is often reviled — at least in part — by various groups, such as religious fundamentalists, who find the ideas in their holy books challenged or environmentalists who wish to blame science for pollution, starvation and all the ills of the world. Sometimes, politicians become annoyed when scientific results do not correspond with those which would further their particular platforms or beliefs. Results obtained by the scientific method are often inconvenient to political agendas and politicians will ignore them as irrelevant, dismissing them as a mere "theory" or worldview. These attacks on science are usually very picky, with those who attack science and label it as irrelevant are quite content to use cars, fly in planes, use satellite navigation and espouse their views over the internet.

Critics of science are quick to point out that "science is always changing", as if it was inconsistent, able to alter its views at the drop of a hat and render itself irrelevant to the real world. In reality, this ability to change is one of the greatest strengths of science. All of science can be considered to be "work in progress", a work which corrects its mistakes and which not only changes but actively improves its theories. Unlike most of its critics, who will devote themselves to their worldview in all situations, when science encounters evidence which conflicts with its ideas, it will improve its ideas to take the new evidence into account. One of the best examples of this is the development of the structure of the atom, cube shaped blocks to a complex structure explained by quantum mechanics based entirely on what was observed as technology — aided by other branches of science — became powerful enough to make better and more accurate observations.

A somewhat more cogent criticism of science holds that, as a part of the larger trends of modernity, it tends to diminish the human experience and the human condition. These critics target science as a force which steadily diminishes every aspect of the natural world and human experience to a set of objective mechanical equations. According to these intellectuals, the scientific worldview casts man as a lone, isolated figure living, according to biologist Jacques Monod, in “fundamental isolation . . . like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.” [1] These anti-science critics find this notion of a world purely of particles and (apparently) devoid of souls, the supernatural, and free will unsettling, and they see this world as the necessary intellectual consequence of the objective, materialist scientific worldview. (Whether this is a problem with science or the critics is, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder.)

Other critics claim that science has provided fantastic benefits in the areas of technology, agriculture, and medicine, but that it has not provided any sort of relief in a number of societal areas. During the Enlightenment, science (and, more specifically, the rationalism it embodied) were thought to be the key to the advent of a new golden era of political and social harmony. However, while newer forms of government, such as democracy, did emerge from the Enlightenment, the fields of social and political “science” have seen little to none of the meteoric advancement that characterizes the “hard sciences”, and war, poverty, and exploitation continue to blight the world in spite of the scientific revolution. Some critics contend that science has, in fact, worsened the human condition, because it has advanced the capability of humans to wreak devastation upon themselves and their environment without providing the social and political advancement needed to wield such capabilities responsibly. Pro-science advocates respond by claiming that science ought not to be excoriated for its own successes relative to other fields, that rationalism has wrought some improvements in these areas, and that many of the problems in society and politics stem not from a failure of scientific thought but a lack of scientific thought.

Research

Science is sometimes, for the convenience of people who want to see results, divided into applied science and research science. The first applies scientific discoveries to the development of new and improved technology, from cars to iPods. The second pursues scientific knowledge for its own sake with no particular practical goal in mind. The nice thing about this pure research is that it often ends up providing the raw material and knowledge for unexpected practical uses.

Quotes on science

Dad, you should listen to him. He's a man of science and you can barely read.
—Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny...
—Isaac Asimov
If a philosopher or social scientist were to try to encapsulate a single principle that yoked together the intellectual process of civilization, it would be a gradual dismantling of presumptions of magic. Brick by brick, century by century, with occasional burps and hiccups, the wall of superstition has been coming down. Science and medicine and political philosophy have been on a relentless march in one direction only -- sometimes slow, sometimes at a gallop, but never reversing course. Never has an empirical scientific discovery been deemed wrong and replaced by a more convincing mystical explanation. ("Holy cow, Dr. Pasteur! I've examined the pancreas of a diabetic dog, and darned if it's NOT an insulin deficiency, but a little evil goblin dwelling inside. And he seems really pissed!") Some magical presumptions have stubbornly persisted waaaay longer than others, but have eventually, inexorably fallen to logic, reason and enlightenment, such as the assumption of the divine right of kings and the entitlement of aristocracy. That one took five millennia, but fall it did.
Gene Weingarten

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
—Randall Munroe, xkcd

See also

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Si vous voulez cet article en français, il peut être trouvé à Science (français).

Other articles on science include:

Footnotes

  1. Jacques Monod, ‘‘Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology’’. 1971, Pg. 172-173
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