Science
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[edit] Definition
Science in common parlance usually refers to the accumulated knowledge of humanity of which the various individual "sciences" as taught in school, such as chemistry, biology, and physics, are examples. In most cases, it is refers to the so-called "natural and physical sciences," those branches of knowledge most concerned with the operation of the material universe, as opposed to, for example, pure mathematics or philosophy, which are often concerned with operations of greater abstraction. It is often distinguished from technology in that science is primarily concerned with knowledge about the world, while technology is primarily concerned with the application of that knowledge to the solution of problems. Science is also often distinguished from art in that science is concerned with the knowledge and truth, while art is more concerned with achieving results, by the carrying out of various operations (consider, in this sense, the phrase "more art than science") without necessarily understanding the process by which the operations work. Finally science is often distinguished from pseudoscience in terms of the methodology applied to uncover and accumulate knowledge.
A more accurate description of science would be a process of accumulating knowledge about the world. This process is usually described as the scientific method.
[edit] Science as a Set of Knowledge
As accumulated knowledge, "science" usually refers to the set of facts largely agreed upon by practitioners of science and documented in the appropriate repositories such as conference proceedings, journal articles, textbooks, encyclopedia, and more recently sites such as this one. A statement like "science has shown that dark colors absorb more heat than light colors" is thus shorthand for "the statement 'dark colors absorb more heat than light colors' has been claimed and generally accepted in the scientific literature." Upon being pressed, a scientifically-knowledgeable person can typically point to particular passages in support of this statement. In this sense, not all statements found in the scientific literature are "science," as there are many claims made that have not yet been widely accepted and about which controversy continues to swirl.
It should be stressed that although widespread acceptance is necessary for a statement to become part of the body of knowledge that is "science," this does not mean (as the postmodernists would have it) that science is a purely social endeavor or that scientific truth is a social construct instead of an epistemological statement. For a statement to be accepted, it must typically be supported by evidence and reasoning, such as a controlled experiment, the results of which have themselves been skeptically analyzed (through the process of peer review, among other gatekeepers).
[edit] Science as a Set of Practices
The set of practices surrounding science have been developed over the centuries as a more efficient method for the application of empiricism to the analysis of natural phenomena. At its heart (and in its ideals), the practice of science approaches the skeptical extreme, where all beliefs are subject to question and evidence gathered via empirical, objective experimentation and analysis. In the medical sciences, for example, it has become almost mandatory for a researcher to approach the question of "does this proposed treatment work?" via a placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trials. This experimental paradigm has been established by process of elimination, for example, when it has been shown that attending physicians can inadvertently bias their judgement about whether or not a patient is showing signs of improvement if they know that he has or has not been given a drug (as opposed to a placebo).
The effect of this set of practices is to armor the scientist in advance against known sources of error.
One limitation of this set of practices, however, is to limit the scope of science to those questions that are amenable to this sort of empirical inquiry. It may be possible, for example, to establish by scientific experimentation that a particular meditation practice has a positive effect on the blood pressure. It is impossible, given our current state of science, to establish that it has a positive effect on the soul, as we have no method at our disposal empirically to detect a "soul," let alone to assess changes and effects in it. Similar questions such as the existence of God, the nature of moral behavior, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, the purpose of existence, or the survival of the personality after the death of the body, are similarly unable to be investigated by science. Science does not reject the possibility that these questions may have answers, nor does it demand any particular belief regarding them (and although many scientists are agnostic or atheist regarding these questions, many others are practicing theists and see no contradiction). Science does, however, deny the possibility of investigating these questions as part of "science" (pending further scientific breakthroughs such as a "soul detector"), and as such, considers them not to be part of the knowledge of "science" in the sense defined above.
[edit] See Also
- Scientific Method
- Science and Pseudoscience(index)
- Religion and Philosophy(Index)
- Pseudoscience
- Falsifiability
