visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Jan 03 2009

tags: screening_exam

Category: Articles, Exam Essays

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What are the characteristics of science and scientific knowledge?  What do we use scientific knowledge for?  How does scientific knowledge change through time? What are the social qualities of science?

In this essay, I describe science and scientific knowledge, discuss how that knowledge changes through time, and discuss the social qualities of the scientific community that differentiate it from other communities.

Science, according to Godfrey-Smith in his book Theory and Reality, has three characteristics: it is based in empiricism, meaning that scientific knowledge is relatable through observation to things in the world, it uses mathematics as a way to formally relate concepts, and it has a unique social structure which makes it effective at discovering knowledge about the world.

Scientific knowledge can be used for one of several purposes.  It can be used to classify things in the world (phenomena, objects, characteristics).  This is the “what” of science – what is it and how do we differentiate if from other things.   Scientific knowledge can be used for explanation and prediction, to explain what happened and possibly to be able to predict events.  This is the “how” of scientific knowledge.  It can be used to gain a sense of understanding, which is an extension of explanation:  this tells us why something happened, not just how it happened.  Finally it can be used for control: if we understand why something happened, we can possibly use that knowledge to manipulate the world to cause that something to happen.  This control is not possible for all systems we might have a sense of understanding for.

There are two views of how scientific knowledge changes through time: the one process view and the two process view.   Both views are based in the idea of scientific fallabilism: the scientific body of knowledge at any given point in time approximates reality to the best of human ability at the time.  It does not reflect reality perfectly, and we expect that, as time passes, some of all of that body of knowledge will be replaced with theories that more accurately describe the world.    Scientific change has two parts: covering more of the world and explaining what we think we’ve already covered more accurately.

The one-process view, akin to Argyris’ single loop learning, says that science is evolutionary.  The process of science, the way we generate new theories and test them is constant, but the body of knowledge improves gradually over time.  Popper’s philosophy of science is a good example of one-process science.   He was a a reductionist (the opposite of a holist) and so saw science as a set of  independent theories largely in the form of a set of laws.   He believed that, over time, we gradually add laws to explain more of science and refine existing laws to explain it better.   This is like a traditional gradual Darwinian evolution.

Quine with his holistic theory of knowledge, threw strong doubt onto Popper’s view of scientific change.  Quine holism is a philosophy of science in which one cannot test just one theory (the theory in question) in isolation, but one must inevitably test a whole host of theories.  There are theories that we use in making measurements (the iron in our steel ruler will expand a certain amount at a certain temperature, and our steel ruler is, in fact steel), and our tools were built based on other theories (the microscope really is showing us accurately things that we can’t see with our eyes directly).

In the two-process view of science, not only does the scientific body of knowledge change, but the ways of doing science (methodology) and of expressing and evaluating scientific knowledge may change.  Again, this is akin to Argyris double-loop learning.  Kuhnian revolutions are  exemplar of  two-process idea of science.  Kuhn, late in the 1960s, had a different view of how scientific knowledge changes, a much more dramatic view.   Science within a particular field operates in one of three modes.    In normal mode science, the field operates under a prevailing set of theories, which Kuhn called a paradigm.  A paradigm is not necessarily only set-of-laws, as Popper believed.  The paradgim explains most of the world that the field is interested in, and scientists do not question the foundation theories of the paradigm, but do detail work – looking at how the theory applies to specific contexts, or filling in more detail to the theory.    As this mode progresses, anomalies may build up – observations from the world that the prevailing set of theories cannot sufficiently explain.  When enough anomalies build up, it becomes clear to the field that the prevailing paradigm is not correct or sufficient, and the field descends into chaos.   The large, overarching questions that the formerly prevalent theory explained are now in question, and scientists propose and test new theories which will explain the anomalies.  When a candidate theory is accepted by most scientists, the field goes into revolution, and works to reorient itself under the new theory.  From then on, until the next revolution, it’s normal science.    This revolution (called a Kuhnian revolution) will involve new ways of looking at the world, new methodologies for investigating it, possibly new ways of establishing truth and doing argumentation.   It may be so different, said Kuhn, that ideas from the old paradigm may not be directly comparable to those from the new (Kuhnian incommensurability).

Others build on Kuhnian paradigms to model something closer to how science actually works.  Kuhn said that a field had only one paradigm at a time.  Lakatos said (reflecting reality more) that there is typically more than one competing paradigm in a field at a time, and that the paradigm can be broken into two parts: the hard core of theory that is not questioned, and a soft edge of theory that is questioned and replaced periodically.  Lakatos called this a research tradition.  Laudan expanded on this to say that even the hard core of the paradigm is malleable and can have bits of it be replaced without the need for a Kuhnian revolution.  Laudan called this a research program.

Which brings us to the social mechanism of science.  What makes science work?  Merton was the first to look into the sociology of science, and said that it is comprised of four key characteristics. First it is communal: scientific knowledge is placed into the commons.  It is universal: there are no restrictions on who can become a scientist.  It is disinterested: scientists work for the good of the scientific community, not for their own personal gain.  Finally, it has organized skepticism: the community does not accept new ideas at face value, but instead demands testing and verification.   Individual scientists are motivated by increasing their reputation within the community.  Hull expanded upon this and said that it is not so much reputation that drives scientists, but use of their work – they want other scientists to build upon what they have done.     This usage motivation has tied to it a replicability/skepticism operation; scientists are who use another’s work are motivated to  be skeptical about it and to do their best to ensure that it is accurate, because if they are going to tie their work to it, and it turns out to be false, their work is impacted and then nobody will use their work.   Kirchner addressed the issue of distribution of labor: how does a scientist choose which research program to join?  Answer: join the one that gives the most likelihood of them personally being cited.  This mechanism prevents all scientists in a field from joining one most popular program, because their reputation would be diluted by all the other people in the program.   Thus there is an incentive to try new ideas in order to gain a bigger share of reputation.  Kirchner assumed that everyone’s share of reputation within a program was equal; a later philosopher (whose name escapes me) modified this by saying that the shares are not equal.

To summarize, one can see how ideas about how scientific knowledge changes through time (Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan; the two process model, research programs) and the sociology of science (Merton and Hull and the operation of science and the motivation of individual scientists; Kirchner and “he who followed” and the division of labor in science) are interrelated.