Science as a fact generator
By en:User:AllyUnion, User:Stannered (en:Image:Science-symbol2.png) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
What science does and what science is are related. What science is in terms of it's function is a social process which we use to generate facts which can help us increase our understanding of reality. To fully understand what science is and what science isn't we will have to dive into the philosophy of science and define science.
Starting with the Wikipedia definition of science:
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge")[1][2]:58 is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[a]
Science is a system which if followed can produce facts. It builds and organizes knowledge and an example is the Standard Model which is the deepest most successful product of science that we have.
What is knowledge and how is it generated?
Wikipedia defines knowledge:
Knowledge can refer to a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. It can be implicit (as with practical skill or expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); it can be more or less formal or systematic.[1] In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called epistemology; the philosopher Plato famously defined knowledge as "justified true belief", though this definition is now thought by some analytic philosophers[citation needed] to be problematic because of the Gettier problems while others defend the platonic definition.[2] However, several definitions of knowledge and theories to explain it exist.
Science and more specifically the application of the scientific method is used to generate formal knowledge. Without science we would have no facts which we can trust to be objective. Philosophy and mathematics are equally important as I like to say, we need philosophy and mathematics to formulate the questions for the scientific method to answer, which produces facts which then add or take away credibility from a philosophical approach or and mathematical model. Mathematics produce a model of reality, science allows us to test it, and philosophy explains it.
String theory or what I prefer to label string hypothesis is in my opinion mathematics and philosophy but not science. It's a mathematical model of reality but the tools required to test it by science do not exist and it's not directly observable if it can ever be observed. String theory is also philosophy because it explains some of the deep questions using beautiful mathematics but because it's not supported by science we don't have any facts (data from experiments) suggesting the validity of string theory.
Multiverse theory or what I prefer to call the multiverse hypothesis (the idea that we live in a multiverse) is also mathematics and philosophy. If we cannot do tests in the form of experiments and if the hypothesis cannot be falsified and or tested then it's not supportable by science. That said, it is philosophy and is supported by mathematics. The same can be said about the simulation hypothesis, the "conscious AI" hypothesis, and many others, none of which are scientific but any of which can be supported by mathematics and or philosophy. If we ask whether or not AI has sentience, it's not something which can be answered by science.
Karl Popper and the importance of falsifiability
Karl Popper explained the importance of falsifiability to science:
Critical rationalism is a contrasting 20th-century approach to science, first defined by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rejected the way that empiricism describes the connection between theory and observation. He claimed that theories are not generated by observation, but that observation is made in the light of theories and that the only way a theory can be affected by observation is when it comes in conflict with it.[77]:63–67 Popper proposed replacing verifiability with falsifiability as the landmark of scientific theories and replacing induction with falsification as the empirical method.[77]:68 Popper further claimed that there is actually only one universal method, not specific to science: the negative method of criticism, trial and error.[78] It covers all products of the human mind, including science, mathematics, philosophy, and art.[79]
Critical rationalism embraces the concept of criticism not support:
Critical rationalists hold that scientific theories and any other claims to knowledge can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical content) can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them. Thus claims to knowledge may be contrastingly and normatively evaluated. They are either falsifiable and thus empirical (in a very broad sense), or not falsifiable and thus non-empirical. Those claims to knowledge that are potentially falsifiable can then be admitted to the body of empirical science, and then further differentiated according to whether they are retained or are later actually falsified. If retained, further differentiation may be made on the basis of how much subjection to criticism they have received, how severe such criticism has been, and how probable the theory is, with the least[6] probable theory that still withstands attempts to falsify it being the one to be preferred.
Critical rationalism rejects the classical position that knowledge is justified true belief; it instead holds the exact opposite: That, in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief. It is unjustified because of the non-existence of good reasons. It is untrue, because it usually contains errors that sometimes remain unnoticed for hundreds of years. And it is not belief either, because scientific knowledge, or the knowledge needed to build a plane, is contained in no single person's mind. It is only available as the content of books.
What science can't give us
While science can give us facts about the nature of reality and tell is what "is", it cannot tell us what we "ought" to do, or what we should value. Science is like a fact generating machine which we can feed formal questions to and through the process of science receive a formal answer. In other words, we can test our ideas by the process of science but science merely outputs data based on the input it receives and cannot interpret the data it outputs nor philosophize the questions for input. Philosophy is what we use to determine what we value, which helps us prioritize and structure our questions, while logic and mathematics allow us to structure our questions in such a way so that things make sense. Falsifiability is a concept from philosophy not from science, but it improves our ability to trust the result generated by science. Mathematics also allows us to better interpret the data received from scientific results, as well as to help us to create models of reality from which to test.
@dana-edwards falsifiability sadly has become a much ignored aspect of research. I've read somewhere that ~2/3 of studies and articles in medical sciences are wrong nowadays.
And why is that? Because everybody wants to publish positive results when in fact the negative study results (e.g. disproving efficacy of a new medication) are the statistically significant ones. But negative results don't look fancy so everyone discards those and publishes (false) positive ones
I've made the mistake many times myself. I've learned that in research it's critical to structure your question to be appropriate, and also to design your study to be according to gold standard if it's a study, or to focus on the quality of your experiment because that determines the quality of the result. It's fun to think about some questions but if it's not falsifiable then we cannot take as much from the result.
A lot of studies in medical research that I read aren't well designed and seem to be commercial studies paid for by supplement or other industries. In some cases for example there will be studies on mice and then the media will take that result and act as if it applies to humans. Other times the study isn't up to the gold standard of sufficiently randomized control trial, with sufficient sample sizes. And also studies are almost never reproduced because there is no money in reproducing a study.
Do you think medicine would be more effective as a field if falsifiability were strictly adhered to in practice? I think medical studies can produce useful results at times even with the problems you mention but I wonder if by solving the problems if it would slow progress?
The dilemma really seems to be related to the increasing commercial entanglement of medicine as you said. It is a trade-off between speed of research in discovering ever so more complex, specialized and effective treatments (which is highly desirable) and scientific integrity. One saving grace though is the ability to aggregate several studies on the same topic into a meta-study which may assess and improve the significance of results. In important trials this is done very frequently.
Judging from other fields of science I would also not be surprised if some journals did not uphold their standards of due diligence as much as one might expect. There is a lot of money and influence involved in scientific publication and one might accuse some publishing companies to prioritize commercial interest over scientific.
Science is correlation between thoughts and invention in my openion
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Thank you for a great post! I like it ^^
The science of today is the technology of tomorrow - Edward Teller
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@paps
Without science we get a bunch of zealous beliefs based on faith alone and that's scary. Just saying.
Very informative post. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
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Excelente post!
Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
Science is just a propaganda tool for the rich to brainwash the poor.
But still good post. You put alot of effort in it! Upvoted
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