Views of Science

BACK: Introduction

Introduction

What’s the definition of science? As we study this, we can see that there really isn’t one solid definition for the term. It seems to be changing over and over, other than the raw aspect of making sense of the world around us. But people viewed science in many different lights.

The Cold War

During this time, everyone was thinking about science. How could we build weapons, atomic weapons to try to better ‘war’? 1960 brought up the notion of ‘Big Science,’ a time of extreme growth in the idea for science–the growth here is unreal.

  • 50,000 to 1 million researchers
  • 0.2% GNP to 3% of GNP

Any super power in this new world has to be scientific. Largely before the war, it was a private institute, but now to be ‘with the times,’ you needed to give state funding. The need to “become the best in the world”–of course we need to teach our kids science and mathematical education! There was active state intervention in order to make this happen.

Keep in mind: the goal of the US is the create technologically relevant artifacts of our time. What will bring the maximum output in terms of innovation?

History of Science

When we study the history of science, we see how fluid scientific knowledge is. It’s extremely fascinating–ideas which society believed to be true eons ago, which were deemed as universal truth, are no longer true. It’s fascinating to see how many people still want to become engineers and scientists and researchers when we never can come to an absolute truth. Things are continuously changing in the scientific realm–new data, new concepts, new interpretations.

  • Scientific Revolution (1450-1800)
  • The Enlightenment (1700-1800)
  • The Industrial Revolution (1760-1850)

The most notable transformation that we can study is the idea of the Copernicus Revolution:

The Copernican Revolution changed how people viewed the universe as a whole. Saying that Earth wasn’t in the center of the universe was a HUGE deal. What did it mean for our lives? We’re just floating around in the middle of nowhere. This was a huge cultural shock.

Scientists were once thought of as philosophers of nature. For a long time, these were people who were thought of as moral virtues. Galileo, Newton–they embodied the nature of science as heroes of logic and reasoning.

These great men of science, as well as those from the Cold War also embodied this notion of the ‘unstoppable’ progress of science. This was a basis for arguments for technological determinism.

Views of Science

1. Logical Positivism: Collect data, have some logical structure to organize it, verify if the statements that we come up with are true or false against the real world. The meaning of science in this manner is just the content–nothing more. It is very important to have a logical statement in order for this to happen. Your beliefs about politics, religions, art, have no say in this and must be completely separated from your science.

In this way, scientific progress can be described as theories that are gradually increasing, with the consideration of new data over time. It is super inductive! The statements go from observations to theories.

This is the first problem with this idea. It’s extremely idealized and inductive reasoning doesn’t state truths. Just because something happens over and over again doesn’t mean it will happen tomorrow.

The second problem is that meaning is very hard to define. It suggests that meaning is created solely upon the evidence that we’ve collected. Obviously this is not true, as we’ve seen from the Copernican Revolution. Different interpretations of the data can extract different conclusions.

2. Falsificationism: Induction isn’t going to create certainty! We can’t verify something is true, but it is able to falsify something (counter examples). In this view, science is the process of trying to falsify something through evidence and reasoning.

If something is not falsifiable, it is not a science (religion, Marxism, psychoanalysis). We don’t really care about where the theories or statements come from, but science is the formal procedures after those statements are in place.

There is a limit to this: scientists don’t behave in this way. It doesn’t seem to capture that actual dynamics of science. The problem with this is explained with the Dunheim Quine Thesis: a theory can never be tested in isolation, ie: it doesn’t account for error. If I messed up my lab, I might get wrong numbers–would I then just falsify the whole theory of relativity? One anomaly can act as a falsification argument and is all necessary in terms of logic, but we should not abandon the theory of relativity because some nerd didn’t wash his beaker.

Again, empirical evidence is problematic and not enough to determine which scientific theory to follow. There is a gap that is filled in with human imagination–how we believe about the world and what we want to see from the evidence.

3. Instrumentalism (Bas van Fraassen): Maybe scientific theories are just used as useful instruments. They enable us to make predictions–which is what we want with mdoern science! To make predictions and adapt. So why not just think theories as tools? They’ll be useful for us for a while, but don’t get too attached to them–new ones will come out later. Let’s not try to find some deeper meaning here.

This is against the original philosophers who wanted to discover truth and meaning. Fraassen sort of blends science and engineering rather than discovering something bigger than ourselves.

4. Functionalism (Robert Merton): As a sociologist, Merton thinks of science as a social function. Where is the money coming from? Who’s setting the agenda? Who’s in charge of the lab? What’s the pattern of a scientific career? Norms have been developed to regulate the behavior of scientists:

  • Universalism: Knowledge should be open and circulate–we should all have access to it.
  • Communism: The aptitude of the scientific community–we all need to share our knowledge.
  • Disinterestedness: Scientists should not bring in personal interests into their science. We should be in our little bubble.
  • Organized Skepticism: Don’t ever trust the knowledge you have. Be ready to falsify, if not, be ready to abandon your own ideas.

5. Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigms: A paradigm is an example which then becomes a framework for everyone else to think about. Someone discovers something, and then everyone else jumps onto it to help prove or disprove it. Each paradigm is like a world, and going into a new one is like going from one world to another.

There are two parts of science: normal science and revolutions. Normal science are the normal, puzzle solving activities. Everyone is comfortable with working with this paradigm! Revolutions are the process of shifting paradigms, where people need to completely change their world view. Anomalies are often ignored until there are too many of them and people will begin questioning the paradigm, thus causing a revolution.

There is a very dogmatic feel for normal science–making it extremely effective. We are comfortable within our paradigm and teach people the theories and knowledge that we’ve attained in this paradigm and don’t tell you how to question it. It allows specific groups on tiny bits of the natural world, rather than every single field of knowledge. We often just assume things to be true.

Kuhn suggests that different paradigms are incommensurable, they can’t say that they are the same. The color of your shirt vs how tall the lamp is. For some, this notion is too radical. Everything–truth, how people think–are all relative to the paradigm. It also suggests that data is not pure and and the selection and gathering is already guided by the paradigm. All of your thoughts and beliefs are dependent on the paradigm.

There are ways for people in different paradigms to communicate with each other, in which we describe as trading zones or boundary objects. People from different fields and paradigms can meet up and while they don’t have to agree on everything, they can agree on just a few topics to be able to communicate and have meaningful discussions.

Science, then is an achievement by the community, rather than the production of an individual. You can only establish normalcy as a group. Wittgenstein discusses the notion of a ‘private’ language–it doesn’t work. The point of a language is to communicate and discuss with others. If you’re the only one making up what means what, there is no guarantee that you’ll reliably keep the same value for every key. If it’s only you, you don’t know if you’re really following the rule correctly or not–there’s nobody to keep you accountable. In the same way, science can only be checked by others, thus creating a normative system.

NEXT: Views of Technology