Roush+What+Is+Science?

The exact institution of science has changed many times since the dawn of civilization. Even before civilization began, people have been performing science in its simplest form; trying to figure out how things worked. Even in the times of nomads people performed science to try to figure out how to solve the problems they faced at that time. The problems they faced were considerably more practical than the problem of figuring out the fundamental nature of matter, but complexity is irrelevant to the essence of science. Whether or not something is science does not depend on how clever or creative or unintuitive or even how original it is. Science is the practice of taking in information, through an organization or just a single human brain, and then using that information to form a hypothesis which is then tested and proven either right or wrong. Once the hypothesis is tested thoroughly enough for the scientist’s or organization’s liking, it is considered a theory from which further deductions can be drawn. The basis of science lies in the fact that humans are constantly figuring things out. This figuring is science at its most basic. Science does not have to occur in a laboratory where people in white lab coats mix beakers of colored liquids. Essentially, wherever there is a human, there is a scientist. We all constantly collect and analyze data through our senses. Using these data, we make hypotheses about the world around us, and then we test these hypotheses. If they seem to be accurate, then we continue to use them and consider them a good representation of some kind of truth until we find an exception. And depending on how long we have used the theory in question, we will be variably reluctant to change it entirely in the light of just one seeming exception. This is, of course, a very broad definition of science. This definition implies that every time someone thinks about how any system works, no matter how mundane it may be, that person is a scientist conducting science. They would be able to say that their job is “scientist,” but then not everybody who paints or writes could say that their job is “artist.” The problem that people run into when trying to define science is that they want to keep it lofty. They want to make science into something that only a truly gifted person can do. In reality, science is one of the things that comes naturally to every human who has ever lived. For humans, science is like breathing. However, the distinction must be made that not every human who has ever lived is a good scientist. Some people, in fact, are very bad scientists. They may observe a phenomenon, and then form a hypothesis about why that phenomenon occurred but not test their hypothesis and still consider it to be true. This is very poor science, but it is science none the less. It is an inquiry into the way the world works. This inquiry leads to a //perceived// greater understanding of the universe. Whether or not that understanding is //actually// greater is irrelevant to whether or not it is science. When Aristotle said that everything was made of fire, water, air, and earth, he was performing science, even though we now think that all matter is composed of the elements on the periodic table; and even though our current atomic theory that all matter is composed of atoms which are made of different combinations of protons and neutrons with electrons whizzing around them seems to be fitting with all of the data we have collected, we can never know this theory to be true for sure. So science cannot be defined in terms of truth because then we would never be totally sure if something is science because we can never know definitively that something is true. One might say that science is the progression from lesser understanding to greater understanding about the universe through experimentation, but this uses the relative term “greater understanding.” This would mean that the specific science that is conducted at any given point is more scientific than the science that came before it. If this were the case, then there must be some reason //why// science gets more scientific. If the reason that science would get more scientific is that it becomes more true, then we would run into the same old question: “How can you know something is true?” We could point to the fact that our theories match up better with our data, but maybe our data is just wrong. Maybe instead of our theories getting more true than the old theories, our data is just getting more false than the old data. I acknowledge that this is a stretch of logic, but still the definition of science can’t rely on any assumptions as huge as that. We can’t just ignore this possibility for the sake of argument. Because of the problems introduced when we include any allusion to absolute truth in our definition of science, we must leave the concept of truth out of our definition. This means that whether or not something is true has nothing to do with whether or not it is science. Science is the practice of inventing rules by which we think the universe acts. These rules don’t have to be correct or even reasonable. All these rules have to do is attempt to provide an explanation for how the world works. Many of those explanations, both past and present, are not used by the majority of humans to make predictions about the world. Any wives’ tale remedy is really a scientific theory of medicine. No doctor would ever prescribe a tablespoon of honey for a sore throat, but that is just an Illustration of the two different scientific organizations. The first of the two scientific organizations is the research institute. This is a place where people’s common conception of science occurs. The science that goes on at a research institute is the science that gets published and becomes the theories that go into textbooks. The second organization of science is much less professional. It is simply a single person or a small group of people thinking about how a phenomenon occurred. This is the scientific organization that people often say is not scientific. But, as I have said many times in this essay, any attempt at an explanation of how the world works is science. The institution of science, however, is what we see as reliable science. The institution of science is what makes the theories that we use to control pandemics and to send shuttles to the space station. These are tested and proven theories that explain the ways of the world. This institution makes the science that survives the ages. Like any human institution, however, science is affected by the elements of the society in which it is practiced. Humans have opinions and biases, and so then does their science. Society has opinions and biases, too, and that affects science as well. Society not only affects science as in the example of Copernicus, whose theory was not widely accepted because the vast majority of society believed in the Bible, but science is also affected by society in the sense that science can only build on what came before it. There is a reason why science seems to progress toward greater understanding, it is because of the principle of causality. You cannot run before you learn to walk. There is a reason why the Dark Matter hypothesis did not come before the theory of General Relativity. There is also a reason why Egypt developed better geometry than Greece. The location and era in which a society is located is often the most driving factor of institutional science. Science is humanity’s evolutionary answer to the sharp claws and teeth of other animals. That is why the institution of science started in the first place. For tens of thousands of years, humans lived without any complex form of communication. Once complex communication started, people were able to pass down scientific lessons from parents to children. After that, writing developed. Now people could pass down more information to more people. This is the start of the institution of science. I called science our “evolutionary answer,” and this implies that science is instinctual to humans. It is. Science is what humans do. Instead of being physically good survivors, we are mentally good survivors. Science is the specific thing that makes us good survivors. Our adaptation to the natural world is science. However, science has gone far beyond just a set of rules on how to survive. Almost everyone alive on Earth today is surviving without any understanding whatsoever of relativity. However, we have undoubtedly come up with this theory, so why? The reason is that we just can’t help ourselves. It’s like the crab that camouflages itself by attaching things to its shell. It will instinctually attach anything around it to itself, even if those things actually make it less camouflaged. By the same token, humans will instinctually figure out how any phenomenon works. We do this because we can’t not do it. Science is the way that humans instinctually probe the world around us. The ideas that science leads us to are not always completely correct, but they do provide an explanation as to how the world works. That explanation could be completely unreasonable, but that is not the point. Every attempt to figure out the ways of the world is science.