Question: what is science???

Andrew McDowall answered on 13 Mar 2024:

There is a branch of philosophy known as Epistemology that deals with knowledge – what it is, how you gain it and whether it’s justified. Within this there is Empirical knowledge, which handles knowledge gained from the senses and from observation. Science falls into the empirical part of epistemology.

The key to science is the Scientific method – that ideas, hypotheses, lead to predictions, predictions can be tested by experiment and shown to be correct or incorrect. If correct the idea gains strength and may eventually become a theory – a hypothesis that hugely well supported by evidence and testing. If the prediction is incorrect then the hypothesis is false and must be abandoned or modified and tested again. If an idea does not lead to a prediction, if that prediction cannot be tested aginst observable phonomena, if that test cannot show the idea to be correct or incorrect, and the test then repeated again and again with the same result, then it is not science. The scientific method is a constant cycle of testing, analysis, confirmation, correction and prediction.

In this sense every idea within science sits in a permanent state of pending wrongness, just awaiting an observation that tips it into actual wrongness, but some ideas have been so well tested and so well refined that for all our searching we’ve been unable to find why or how they’re wrong so they must be right or very nearly so. This means Science is not (or perhaps that is “Should not”) be dogmatic, fixed immovably to an idea, but is (should be) self-correcting and self-healing, which helps explain why it works even with creatures so messy and confused, story driven and tribal as humans. It changes the description of the world to match the world whereas people have a tendency to seek to change the world to match their description of it.

There are certain assumptions that form part of science. It is naturalistic, it deals with an observable and testable reality, one that is shared by all observers, and one that is governed by natural laws.

There are different camps within science as to whether science aims at and suceeds at finding absolute truth, or whether absolute truth cannot be found by scientific means – it just a model that matches truth closely. I tend to fall into the third camp, that suggests it doesn’t matter whether a theory is absolutely true or is absolutely not true, but whether the outcome is useful. It doesn’t matter to me if science is truth, or models truth without being truth, so long as it works.