Science as a way of knowing

Science as a way of knowing

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.

Introduction

What is “Science”? Everyone probably has some idea of what the word means, but have you ever really thought about it?  If so, here are some questions to consider.

• Is science a body of knowledge?
• Is it the same thing as “truth”?
• Is it a way to understand everything, or just a few things?
• Is it a process, and if so, can everyone do it? Or do you have to be highly intelligent, highly trained, or both, if you want to understand science?

Hopefully by the end of this course, or even by the end of this first module, you will have some good answers to those questions, and will be well on your way to thinking like a scientist (at least for this class!). Let’s start with the title of this chapter – Science as a Way of Knowing. That description is from the title of a great little book by biologist John A. Moore, and is actually a pretty good answer to the question of “What is Science?” Science is both a body of knowledge, and an evidence-based process for generating that knowledge. The word itself comes from a Latin term, scientia , which means knowledge. But science is also about a particular kind of knowledge - knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the process of “doing science” can only help us gain additional understanding about the natural world. It is of no use to us if we want to understand the supernatural. For that we need other ways of knowing.

There are also some other aspects of science which you need to know, as you move toward a better understanding of both the scientific knowledge base and the scientific process.

Science

• requires interaction with the natural world in terms of observation, detection, or measurement.
• is objective, or evidence-based; that evidence, or a repeated demonstration of the evidence, must be available to everyone. Scientists generally don’t just “take your word for it.”
• requires independent evaluation and replication by others.
• leads to conclusions that are always provisional , i.e., they will be rejected or modified if new observations or measurements show that they are false.

There are, of course, other "ways of knowing". How do we know what we know? People who study knowledge (yes, there are such people, and they are in the branch of philosophy known as epistemology) often classify that knowledge based on the source of the knowledge. In mathematics and logic, for example, we can point to things that we know are "rationally true". In science, we focus on things that are "empirically true", i.e., based on evidence that we can see, hear, touch, etc. In religion, and, to a lesser extent, in history, we focus on "revelational truth", or knowledge that comes from another source that we accept as true, based on our assessment of the reliability of the source. So the subjects that you might study at this university can depend on different sources for the knowledge that you will be gaining. In this class we will focus, as noted above, on objective evidence obtained from observations of the natural world, and we will use some very specific terms to describe how those empirical observations form the basis for scientific knowledge and understanding.