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Justification for this description of science
How can we justify a description of science as "Trying to give correct answers to questions that we feel have correct answers"?
  • We can observe scientists carrying out their work, and record what they do, and/or summarise the findings of others who have done the same thing.
  • We can look at answers given by others to the same question and show that these answers are similar, i.e. that the word "science" is being used in the same way.

This raises the question of what kind of a question is "what is science" and what kind of an answer would seem to be a satisfactory one. The question "what is science" is not one that we feel has a correct answer. Therefore, according to the above description of science, it cannot be described as a scientific question. Instead, it shoud be categorised as a philosophical question - see whatisscience.info/12.html.

Justification from the behaviour of scientists

We can look at scientists and say that, in general, the way they are acting is in accord with the answer of "trying to give correct answers to questions that we feel have correct answers". This is my belief from my personal experience, but without any systematic recording and analysis, and it is not clear if any research has studied this. This might be considered a circular argument in that if someone is not acting according to the description of science, then they would not be judged to be scientists, but this is not a difficulty. We are making a self-consistent description of a clustering of human behaviour. A key point is that this has been very successful in making predictions that have turned out to be correct.

Justification from the description of others

The answer "Trying to give correct answers to questions that we feel have correct answers" is not very different from the descriptions given by some other authors. The following are some examples, but there is a wide range of views - see the examples in the www.Appendix: Survey of published definitions of science.
  • Popper (1957) in The aim of science [1] said that the aim is:
to find satisfactory explanations of whatever strikes us as being in need of explanation

  • A book in the Usborne series (1992) gave the descritpion [2]:
Science is the process of gathering knowledge and answering questions about the world and how it works
.

Philosophical questions

There are some questions that we feel do not have correct answers, because there is no agreed way of deciding what is correct. And yet, of the answers that we come across to these question, some answers seem better than others, and we feel that we want to give the best answer to the question that we can. We feel that we should choose the best answer (in each case). These kinds of questions are philosophical questions .

How should we answer philosophical questions?
If there is not a correct answer to a question, how should we choose the best answer? The answer seems to be
  • on the basis of what seems sensible, which might also be termed "face validity" or "common sense",
  • on the basis of what seems to fit with our (or my) experiences (i.e. general experiences rather than the structured categorized experiences used in science),
  • to aim for consistency with other "best answers" that we want to give to related questions.

This seems to be the best answer to this question of how should we choose best answers.

References

[1] Popper (1957) The aim of science presented in Popper selections (1985) Ed. David Miller, Princetown University Press
[2] The Usborne Book of Scientists (1992) Usborne, London





Last updated: 14 Apr 2018