MODERN VIEWS ON SCIENCE Both Bacon and Descartes were trying to provide a simple, fail-safe
method for
scientific study, but the
MODERN view of the nature of the scientific method is that both experience and reason play an important role in science. Reason or imagination provides speculative hypotheses; experience helps weed out those which are false. Bacon and Descartes had hoped to provide a method that would guarantee that every statement uttered by a responsible scientist would be true. Today it is recognized that no automatic method exists for creating good scientific theories. In addition, no scientific theory, regardless of how well it has been tested, can be considered infallible. Nevertheless, sound ways have been developed to criticize and test such theories and to eliminate bad ones. Testing Scientific Theories Accounts of the actual testing of scientific theories tend to be rather technical and often require the use of statistics; however, some of the basic results can be easily understood and are of direct practical importance. Deductive fallacies have been known since ancient times. Less well known and more recently discovered are what might be called inductive fallacies, or mistakes in scientific reasoning. A simple example is the fallacy of using irrelevant data, which Bacon illustrated with the following story: ...it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple picture of those who had paid their
vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods--"Aye," asked he again, "but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?" And such is the way of all superstition. The basic conjecture to be testedÑ"If one makes a vow during a storm at sea, then one will not be drowned"Ñcan be abbreviated as: "If V, then not-D." The proposed method for collecting
data either to support or to refute the conjecture is as follows: go to churches and record instances of people who paid their vows as thanks for having escaped drowning. The instances so collected, which can be described as cases of V and not-D, appear at first to confirm the conjecture. Evidence that would refute it, howeverÑeven a single case of V and DÑis logically impossible to find, given the method of collecting data. One of the basic principles of scientific testing can therefore be stated roughly in the following manner: the outcome of a certain test cannot confirm a theory unless it is logically possible that there could be another outcome that would have disconfirmed the theory. There is, then, a widespread philosophical consensus on the methods that
scientists should not use. Far less agreement exists concerning the details of positive prescriptions for science. Scientists can usually decide more easily which theories are false than which theories are true. This situation is typical of many fields. For example, voters find it easier to say what makes a politician unsatisfactory than to describe an ideal politician. Current Issues Concerning the Nature of Science Many issues remain controversial when considering the nature of science. All of them concern scientific inquiry in general, irrespective of the scientific subject matter. Problems also arise directly from the content of specific scientific theories. Thus
theorists in physics are trying to determine whether a new kind of logic, called quantum logic, is required in order to formalize quantum mechanics while theorists in biology have tried to analyze the concept of species as it is used in population genetics. Theorists in psychology have contributed to the debate between Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner about whether the child''s acquisition of language can best be understood as, respectively, an innate capacity of the human mind or entirely the product of conditioning. Theorists on science in general have traditionally concentrated on the cognitive aspects of science. Recently, however, thhave become more involved with the social and ethical implications of scientific research. Today philosophers of science join scientists and interested lay people in discussing the concerns raised by recombinant DNA research, the implications of sociobiology and race-IQ research for social policy, the ethics of experimentation with human subjects, and other problems that require both scientific expertise and sensitivity to questions about human values.
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