Week+1+assignment

In these articles, Terry Halwes seems to have some sort of vendetta against the traditional view of the scientific method. She cites three myths about science that she seeks to counter in her articles. She states them as such: “The Myth of Magical Science has three parts: Scientific knowledge is (1) a special, superior type of knowledge, made possible by (2) a special, superior kind of person, a ‘Scientist,’ who uses (3) a superior way of developing and evaluating knowledge, the ‘Scientific Method.’” Each thing that Halwes says is a myth is a myth simply because of the sarcastic way she states them. In my experience, nobody over the age of ten is under the illusion that science is magical. But even ignoring that, she doesn’t clearly state what she proposes as an alternative to the classical idea. She says many times that there are many different scientific methods that people use, and this is true, but in my experience they all revolve around the idea of a hypothesis that is being tested. I don’t see any other way to construct an experiment. What I really get out of these articles is that Halwes is a very bitter woman. I imagine that at some point she was doing an experiment and somebody told her it was improper science, and thus was born a desire to prove her case. Most of all, I think she is confusing what the scientific method is for. It’s for determining the truth behind a hypothesis. She probably works more with discovery science, in which the main activity is to observe nature, as opposed to theoretical science in which the main goal is to manipulate nature in order to do an experiment whose goal is to find out about nature. I’ve never heard any science teacher say that the only way to determine anything is to use the scientific method, the way that Halwes described it. Obviously you can’t derive a hypothesis from a theory without first observing nature in order to develop the theory in the first place. Halwes’ main issue seems to be with the definition of the word “scientific.” She says that “science” is as ordinary as everything else, and with that I disagree. I prefer to look at the glass half full, and say that everything is as amazing as science. Regardless, the whole argument is just semantics, and probably did not warrant three articles of such length to argue such a meaningless idea.