what is science

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1)what exactly is science? 2)is it a body of systematised knowledge or is it a process of gathering knowledge?

-- soul (subtlesoul@yahoo.com), July 12, 2002

Answers

It's both. Scientists use the scientific method, or the hypothetico- deductive method; in each field they follow standardized procedures for collecting and testing and interpreting data. On the basis of such data collection they build a body of knowledge which is gathered into the textbooks of the field.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), July 13, 2002.

I don't know that scientists really use the hypothetico-deductive method all that often. Certainly they don't use it exclusively. Even when predictions are derived from prior theories, they often are not deductively valid. Often they are just of high probabilty. Or even not very high absolute probablity -- just higher than the obvious alternatives. Consider the classic disease example. Only a small percentage, say 5%, of people who contract virus V actually develop the symptoms of disease D. Still, the probabilty of developing that symptom cluster without contracting V is far less, say 0.001%. So, a certain person's having D is good evidence for their having contracted V, though it is by no means deductively certain that V will lead to D. (By the way, something very much like this is true for cholera.)

More important, however, often there are not specific predictions. Many scientists use models that capture some of the behavior of a particular system under study, but not all of it, and it is hard to predict in advance exactly which aspects of the system will be captured. The process is more exploratory than hypothetico-deductive.

You might be interested in Ronald Giere's and Nancy Cartwright's books on this topic. Giere's are _Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach_ (1988) and _Science Without Laws_ (1999) (among others). Cartwright's are _How the Laws of Physics Lie_ (1983) and _The Dappled World_ (1999) (also among others).

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), July 18, 2002.


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