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The Documentation of the Nature of Science, July 12, 2008
There is lots of talk among people over what "science" really is and what constitutes "scienticity". Despite the fact that the word science comes from the Latin word "scientia" (literally meaning "knowledge"), most defenders of science are simply not familiar with what "science" truly is. Most people seem to blindly and ignorantly assume that science is "empirically verified" or "conclusive" or "strictly observationally based" or "skeptical" or "exclusively inductive" or "strictly peer reviewed" or other ignorant maxims popularized by inferior science magazines and channels [National Geographic, Discovery, Scientific American, etc.]. In reality science is all over the place and really overlaps superstitions at times too. Basic things people do, play key roles in science like inquiry, thought, and reason as the basis of investigations of nature as is the basis also for investigating local news or picking a car insurance wisely or how to invest one's own money or how to solve a neighbor's personal problems.
This work puts many of these cherished beliefs to rest by describing with heavy detail the very nature of science as ultimately, as I usually say, "reasonable and explanatory". Truly Ernest Nagel does a phenomenal job of putting science where it belongs - as philosophy. Natural Philosophy to be more precise.
Also this book does a good job of making the distinction that science is not nature and nature is not science. The study and attempt of simulation of nature is what leads to any science, whether it be a superstitious science, statistical science , an abstract science, a true science, or a false science.
I will write the Chapter titles and give some objects of discussion found in these chapters.
1. "Introduction: Science and Common Sense"
What makes science different from common sense, specificity of systematic explanations, the rise of science from practical advantages, systematic configuration of information, specificity of "scientific" languages as explanations of explanations
2. "Patterns of Scientific Explanation"
The place of the explandum in statements of explanations for "why" questions, illustrations of scientific explanation, 4 types of explanation (with corresponding problems in their usage as explanations): Deductive Model of Explanation, Probabilistic Explanations, Teleological or "Functional" Explanations, and Genetic Explanations. Lack of explanations for the "necessity" of the ontology of natural phenomena.
3. "The Deductive Pattern of Explanation"
Problems and insights explanation, applications of explanations on the conformity of natural laws, explanations applied on individual events, common emergence of generality found in explanations, epistemic requirements for Deductive Explanation including the Aristotlian view of appropriate adequacy for premises in Deductive Explanation
4. "The Logical Character of Scientific Laws"
Accidental and Nomic Universality, difficulties of arguing of laws as necessary constructs of reality, the nature of nomic universality, contrary-to-fact universals, critiques of Hume's nomic universality, causal laws. locus of inference. Along with multiple historical examples emphasizing the significance of these issues.
5. "Experimental Laws and Theories"
Distinctions between experimental laws and theories, descriptions as non-logical constructs in experimental laws, the 3 major components of theories (Physical and Chemical mostly): 1. abstract calculus, 2. rules that reference empirical content, and 3. interpretation the unites the abstractions and references, lack of direct empirical evidence for many aspect of theories, vagueness of some theoretical language.
6. "The Cognitive Status of Theories"
Analogy as basis for theories, Descriptive View of theories, translatability, or lack thereof, of theoretical languages among theories and other theories, Instrumentalist View of theories, abstractive and hypothetical theories, theories based on "Ideal" conditions, parameters, and shapes.
7. "Mechanical Explanations and the Science of Mechanics"
What a Mechanical Explanation is, the history of Mechanics - Statics and Dynamics, detailed discussion over Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and their significance, limits of using mathematics for deriving laws, ideal state problems as a guide to Mechanics, the logical status of mechanical science.
8. "Space and Geometry"
Classical Mechanics and Euclidean (pure) Geometry
9. "Geometry and Physics"
Inadequacy of Classical Mechanics and the rise of Relativity and 2 Non-Eucladian Geometries: 1. Lobachewskian Geometry and 2. Reimannian Geometry
10. "Causality and Indeterminism in Physical Theory"
Deterministic structure of Classical Mechanics, alternate descriptions of physical states, atomic statistically properties of substances, lack of empirical evidence for components of statistical hypotheses, Probabilistic Explanations, language of Quantum Mechanics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, problems and misinterpretations of uncertainties, dual nature subatomic constructs, Psi functions as statistical magnitude measurements, indeterminism in Quantum Theory, principle of causality, Chance as meaning scientific ignorance.
11. "Reduction of Theories"
Autonomy of sciences, reduction of sciences, reductive explanations, reduction of the thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, formal conditions for reduction, non-formal conditions for reduction, borrowing of theories and laws by other sciences, doctrine of emergence, possible changing of laws of nature, wholes, sums, and organic unities.
12. "Mechanical Explanations and Organismic Biology"
objections to Biology being absorbed or reduced to Physics, structure of Teleological Explanations, "design" or "functional" language almost impossible to avoid in biological and physiological systems (i.e. God-of-the-Gaps fallacy and the Evolution-of-the-Gaps fallacy), spatial and temporal organization statements as implying a "final end or purpose", standpoint of Organismic Biology, reduction and "primary sciences" and "secondary sciences", lack of complete autonomy of Biology as of yet.
13. "Methodological Problems of the Social Sciences"
objections to social sciences (anthropology, social science, political science, economics, Psychology, etc) as true "sciences", Controlled Inquiry as a core method, Controlled Experiment difficulties, problems with social relativity and social laws, bias, knowledge of social phenomenon as social variables, subjective nature of social subject matter, "behaviorism", "Value-Oriented" bias of social inquiry.
14. "Explanation and Understanding of the Social Sciences"
Statistical generalizations, "functionalism" and teleological and causal explanations, methodical individualism and social interpretations
15. "Problems in the Logic of Historical Inquiry"
Reliability of sources, the focus of historical inquiry, Probabilistic and Genetic Explanations, recurrent issues in historical inquiry, and Determinism in history
This book is 600 pages of philosophical rigor and is very dense in content. A prior background in Physics or Chemistry and Calculus will be helpful. I think that this book is better than Popper's works and that this book deserves a wide audience. After reading this and the Christian lawyer Francis Bacon's Francis Bacon: The New Organon and Related Writings which is to be the foundational text on the "Scientific Method" and it's variants, you will know what science truly is.
For further reading on types of explanations used in science and also in every day life then please read Theories of Explanation and Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. For further reading on theories please read The Structure of Scientific Theories. You'll see that science isn't anything special, but is instead commonly used by the uneducated as well. Popular science books, Discovery Channel, and general science magazines don't do science justice since they misrepresent science a lot as an impenetrable institution of "peer reviewed" skepticism and direct evidence that it would seem like science is air tight with many non contradictory results and stable non contradictory evidences supporting most theories, when in reality science is not an institution at all nor can anyone claim in their right mind to "do" science. Science simply is an end after inquiry and open minded investigation, not a means to an end, per se.
Also the vast majority of historical scientists were not peer reviewed by "impartial" anonymous peers, usually friends or personal peers would comment and review. After world war II peer reviewing by "impartial" peers before publishing became the norm. It would seem that scientific revolutions have not occurred in the past 50 years or so because of the freelance refereed journals prohibiting even Nobel Prize winning papers. Read Frank Tipler's essay in Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing for further information on this issue.
Here are a few sample quotes from Tipler's paper on peer reviewed science:
"We first need to understand what the "peer review" process is. That is, we need to understand how the process operates in theory, how it operates in practice, what it is intended to accomplish, and what it actually does accomplish in practice. Also of importance is its history. The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a "peer" reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus's heliocentric system, Galileo's mechanics, Newton's grand synthesis--these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by the authors or by the authors' friends. Even Darwin never submitted his idea of evolution driven by natural selection to a journal to be judged by "impartial" referees. Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin's friends. And Darwin's article was completely ignored. Instead, Darwin made his ideas known to his peers and to the world at large through a popular book: On the Origin of Species."
"If one reads memoirs or biographies of physicists who made their great breakthroughs after, say, 1950, one is struck by how often one reads that "the referees rejected for publication the paper that later won me the Nobel Prize." One example is Rosalyn Yalow, who described how her Nobel-prize-winning paper was received by the journals. "In 1955 we submitted the paper to Science[the Journal]. The paper was held there for eight months before it was reviewed. It was finally rejected. We submitted it to the Journal of Clinical Investigations, which also rejected it." (Quoted from The Joys of Research, edited by Walter Shropshire, p. 109). Another example is Günter Blobel, who in a news conference given just after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, said that the main problem one encounters in one's research is "when your grants and papers are rejected because some stupid reviewer rejected them for dogmatic adherence to old ideas." According to the New York Times (October 12, 1999, p. A29), these comments "drew thunderous applause from the hundreds of sympathetic colleagues and younger scientists in the auditorium."
"And if Annalen der Physik rejected a paper, for whatever reason, any professional German physicist had an alternative: Zeitschrift für Physik. This journal would publish any paper submitted by any member of the German Physical Society. This journal published quite a few worthless papers. But it also published quite a few great papers, among them Heisenberg's first paper on the Uncertainty Principle, a central idea in quantum mechanics. There was no way in which referees or editors could stop an idea from appearing in the professional journals. In illustration of this, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr said, according to Abraham Pais (The Genius of Science, p. 307), that if a physicist has an idea that seems crazy and he hesitates to publish so that someone else publishes the idea first and gets the credit, he has no one to blame but himself. In other words, it never occurred to Bohr that referees or editors could stop the publication of a new idea."
Investigate the nature of science and see what you find.
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