The thread title pretty much says it all?
How do we define science? What fields are sciences and which are only pseudoscience or wholly unscientific? Are scientific methods the only path to real truth about the universe?
sure it is, everything what we do and everything around us is science... to understand it we need to understand the basic things about it what we learn in schools..etc. and if we are interested in learning more, we start reading books or gathering more information what can we find about different scientists and about their ideas... so I can explain much about science, since my English and information is still not so wide.
Science also helps to answer questions what we were asking all the time, but there are unanswered questions that we continue to try to answer them... like about endlessness is the most weird one, when we see it a lot of times, like standing between two mirrors and we can watch how the reflection or how you call it, is going somewhere endlessness...
P.S. Don't think too much about these weird and unanswered questions, or you can get nuts!
(17-09-2009 09:55 PM)melbicimni Wrote: [ -> ]The thread title pretty much says it all?
How do we define science? What fields are sciences and which are only pseudoscience or wholly unscientific? Are scientific methods the only path to real truth about the universe?
"False" science is often the formative stage of a "true" science. Alchemy and phrenology are in that category. As well as "true" and "false" science, we have the notions of "hard" and "soft" science, with the latter focused on merely human matters such as society. It should be noted that what Americans call "hard science" may still be categorized by the British as "natural philosphy."
Rather than- or in addition to- "true and false" and "hard and soft," we might think in terms of high science and low science. High science requires a testable hypothesis, while low science offers a formal discipline and an "understanding."
In the Victorian age, a putatively rational approach to anything was often praised as "science." Thus we have Eddy's Science of Mind and Marx's Science of Capital, propounded in the same year. Such low sciences as astrology and numerology thrive on and add to their vast stores of data.
In addition to the physical and natural sciences generally regarded as "real science," there are less prestigious but falsifiable sciences such as Taylor's scientific management, scientific polling, and numerous sports sciences. Corbett's scientific boxing could be verified in the ring and so it was; and it was still verified and praised by Cassius Clay generations afterward. There was the science of hitting baseballs and the science of baseball management. Branch Rickey claimed that his Six-Foot Formula, published in 1954, would bring a world series victory to the last place Pittsburgh Pirates within 5 years: it actually took 6.
(18-10-2009 02:33 PM)CornetJoyce Wrote: [ -> ]"False" science is often the formative stage of a "true" science. Alchemy and phrenology are in that category. As well as "true" and "false" science, we have the notions of "hard" and "soft" science, with the latter focused on merely human matters such as society. It should be noted that what Americans call "hard science" may still be categorized by the British as "natural philosphy."
Rather than- or in addition to- "true and false" and "hard and soft," we might think in terms of high science and low science. High science requires a testable hypothesis, while low science offers a formal discipline and an "understanding."
Testable in what sense? By way of the Duhem-Quine thesis of scientific testing, a "crucial experiment" is actually impossible. Whenever we "test" a theory, we are actually testing that theory and an entire paradigm's worth of assumptions about the metaphysics of the universe, the correctness of mathematical abstractions, the infallability of logic, and even more specific things, like the reliability of our instruments, the correctness of all of the theories that your theory is based on, and ultimately an unmeasurably large body of knowledge which makes finding the source of the anomaly in any test quite impossible.
It is also true that "testability" is a vague criteria riddled with issues. Does it need to be testable in principle, or in practice? When a theory is tested, are we testing to verify or to falsify? The differences between the hard and soft sciences often seem to melt away when you realize how uncertain the knowledge we have gleaned from "hard" sciences actually is.
It was not too long ago that we were convinced that Newtonian Physics were correct, that electrons moved in steady rings around the nucleus of an atom, that it was phlogistons which allowed fire to burn, that the air was made up of a single gas, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the reason things fell to the ground was because they were struggling to get to the center of the earth.
It's not so clear that the "hard sciences" are inherently more testable than the "soft sciences", or that either can be distinguished from "pseudo-science" (categories into which phlogiston theory and the ptolemic system would seem to fit under traditional definitions). I'd argue that our traditional notions of the "social sciences" as being less testable is ultimately rooted in the instability of paradigms in the field, with at least several theories all competing for the interests of scientists.
(18-10-2009 02:33 PM)CornetJoyce Wrote: [ -> ]In the Victorian age, a putatively rational approach to anything was often praised as "science." Thus we have Eddy's Science of Mind and Marx's Science of Capital, propounded in the same year. Such low sciences as astrology and numerology thrive on and add to their vast stores of data.
In addition to the physical and natural sciences generally regarded as "real science," there are less prestigious but falsifiable sciences such as Taylor's scientific management, scientific polling, and numerous sports sciences. Corbett's scientific boxing could be verified in the ring and so it was; and it was still verified and praised by Cassius Clay generations afterward. There was the science of hitting baseballs and the science of baseball management. Branch Rickey claimed that his Six-Foot Formula, published in 1954, would bring a world series victory to the last place Pittsburgh Pirates within 5 years: it actually took 6.
Interesting. I don't really have much else to say about this.
(21-10-2009 03:33 PM)melbicimni Wrote: [ -> ]Testable in what sense? By way of the Duhem-Quine thesis of scientific testing, a "crucial experiment" is actually impossible. Whenever we "test" a theory, we are actually testing that theory and an entire paradigm's worth of assumptions about the metaphysics of the universe, the correctness of mathematical abstractions, the infallability of logic, and even more specific things, like the reliability of our instruments, the correctness of all of the theories that your theory is based on, and ultimately an unmeasurably large body of knowledge which makes finding the source of the anomaly in any test quite impossible.
It is also true that "testability" is a vague criteria riddled with issues. Does it need to be testable in principle, or in practice? When a theory is tested, are we testing to verify or to falsify? The differences between the hard and soft sciences often seem to melt away when you realize how uncertain the knowledge we have gleaned from "hard" sciences actually is.
It was not too long ago that we were convinced that Newtonian Physics were correct, that electrons moved in steady rings around the nucleus of an atom, that it was phlogistons which allowed fire to burn, that the air was made up of a single gas, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the reason things fell to the ground was because they were struggling to get to the center of the earth.
It's not so clear that the "hard sciences" are inherently more testable than the "soft sciences", or that either can be distinguished from "pseudo-science" (categories into which phlogiston theory and the ptolemic system would seem to fit under traditional definitions). I'd argue that our traditional notions of the "social sciences" as being less testable is ultimately rooted in the instability of paradigms in the field, with at least several theories all competing for the interests of scientists.
Priestley discoved oxygen and
still couldn't tear himself away from the phlogiston theory. I must say, I still have no complaints about phlogiston...
That new science only slowly overtakes old science is obvious and has been made more obvious by Kuhn and beaten to death by his disciples, many of whom he expressly disowned.
I do not perceive a contradiction between the overcoming of old paradigms by new on one hand and the principal of falsifiability on the other. The notion of the testable hypothesis seems quite clear to me. My wife edits scientific journals and it seems even clearer to her. "Social science" on the other hand, is to science as military music is to music.
(21-10-2009 08:48 PM)CornetJoyce Wrote: [ -> ] (21-10-2009 03:33 PM)melbicimni Wrote: [ -> ]Testable in what sense? By way of the Duhem-Quine thesis of scientific testing, a "crucial experiment" is actually impossible. Whenever we "test" a theory, we are actually testing that theory and an entire paradigm's worth of assumptions about the metaphysics of the universe, the correctness of mathematical abstractions, the infallability of logic, and even more specific things, like the reliability of our instruments, the correctness of all of the theories that your theory is based on, and ultimately an unmeasurably large body of knowledge which makes finding the source of the anomaly in any test quite impossible.
It is also true that "testability" is a vague criteria riddled with issues. Does it need to be testable in principle, or in practice? When a theory is tested, are we testing to verify or to falsify? The differences between the hard and soft sciences often seem to melt away when you realize how uncertain the knowledge we have gleaned from "hard" sciences actually is.
It was not too long ago that we were convinced that Newtonian Physics were correct, that electrons moved in steady rings around the nucleus of an atom, that it was phlogistons which allowed fire to burn, that the air was made up of a single gas, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the reason things fell to the ground was because they were struggling to get to the center of the earth.
It's not so clear that the "hard sciences" are inherently more testable than the "soft sciences", or that either can be distinguished from "pseudo-science" (categories into which phlogiston theory and the ptolemic system would seem to fit under traditional definitions). I'd argue that our traditional notions of the "social sciences" as being less testable is ultimately rooted in the instability of paradigms in the field, with at least several theories all competing for the interests of scientists.
Priestley discoved oxygen and still couldn't tear himself away from the phlogiston theory. I must say, I still have no complaints about phlogiston...
That new science only slowly overtakes old science is obvious and has been made more obvious by Kuhn and beaten to death by his disciples, many of whom he expressly disowned.
I do not perceive a contradiction between the overcoming of old paradigms by new on one hand and the principal of falsifiability on the other. The notion of the testable hypothesis seems quite clear to me. My wife edits scientific journals and it seems even clearer to her. "Social science" on the other hand, is to science as military music is to music.
I could contest that Priestley discovered oxygen, since he didn't understand anything about its behavior. Lavoisier was the first to understand its nature (and coined the name), while Scheele was the first to isolate it.
Priestley was the first to publish it, but he published all of his experiments, and himself admitted that he basically just burned every chemical he could get his hands on to see what it would do.
In any case, it's not the overcoming of old paradigms and the introduction of new ones that serve as a detriment to falisfiability, but that paradigm choice isn't based on one being "falsified" while the other remains true, because paradigms are self-justifying.
And yeah, I'm reading a lot of Kuhn and Popper right now.