Scientific world view
The task of sciences is to make sense of the phenomena in the world.
This task is common to all sciences, including natural science, humanities and
also mathematical sciences. This essay will focus on the natural and human
sciences, because they are closely linked to the lifeworld, but much of what concerns
the procedures of science is valid to mathematical sciences as well.
The essential criteria of science are publicity, openness (transparency
of argumentation), criticality and self-correcting procedures. In the academic
sense, publicity means that the results of research have gone through peer
evaluation and then they are published. Writings left in a drawer are not yet
scientific knowledge. A great deal of research takes place in private
enterprises and results are made public possibly only after product inventions
have been protected by patents. Then those pieces of knowledge become part of the
edifice of scientific knowledge, too.
Publicity is one of the bases for criticality. Results are open to
public criticism. Openness is also a precondition to critical evaluation – or the
critique can be directed just to the gaps in argumentation. Critical evaluation
aims at showing flaws in research papers. New findings may prove current
knowledge wrong or incomplete. New research effort is needed to rectify
deficiencies. The research community evaluates these new results, too. In this
sense science itself corrects its mistakes. The process is not often as
straightforward as described above. There are often a number of competing
explanations and researchers seek passionately the crucial test to show their
own idea to be the right one. They must also accept any refuting evidence. As a
matter of fact, it is rarely the case that any number of tests can prove a
theory to be correct, but one singular falsifying test shows that there is
something wrong in the explanation or in its background assumptions (Popper’s
falsification principle). Successful tests corroborate theories and strengthen
our confidence in them.
The notion of openness is important in relation to previous scientific
knowledge and the lifeworld. References to so far accepted scientific knowledge
should be written out or they are taken as self-evident to the research
community in question, as is the case with common knowledge of the lifeworld.
It is not sensible nor even possible to write out all background assumptions. A
critical reader must be aware of this, and she can question the unuttered
presumptions, too. The individual results of science disseminate gradually to
common knowledge, to all-round education. We need not repeat the history of
science, but let us mention some major milestones that have changed our world
view. There are famous well known scientific discoveries known since classical
antiquity (the law of Archimedes, many mathematical facts), but it was Galileo
who began the modern empirical research and Bacon who wrote its general
principles. Newton laid the foundation of physics in the mathematical language.
The periodic system of the elements brought an order to chemistry, and the atom
model gave an explanation to many chemical and physical phenomena. Darwin’s
theory of evolution was a revolution in biology, and so on. These are pieces of
elementary common knowledge to the modern individual. And the vast amount of
knowledge of history and other humanities help us to define ourselves as human
beings.
The gap between scientific results and our lifeworld, i.e., the
interpretation of the world through the concepts that we use in our everyday
life, is widening due to the ever faster growing amount of new research
publications and ideas. People can use modern technical gadgets that utilise
the quantum mechanics or the relativity theory, but to understand their
function requires a long education in physics. However, an advanced
photographer can see how various settings of the aperture affects the quality
of photos owing to the diffraction of light going through a small hole, for
example.
The total edifice of scientific knowledge has even a more profound
effect on the modern world view than just all the individual results of
research. It provides us the basic ontological structural view into the world. As
we now see it, the laws of nature laid out by physics and chemistry describe
the most invariant part of the universe, on which life in all forms of
manifestation rests, ourselves being one of these forms but with specific
capability to use language, which again has made possible all the intellectual
achievements and the controlling of nature through technology. Various social
sciences try to make sense of human behaviour and complex social structures,
politics and economics. The challenges of social sciences are at least as big
as in natural science, as it is difficult to make sense of something that often
does not seem to have any sense.
At this point we encounter the major difference between natural
sciences, humanities and social sciences. While natural sciences seek laws of
nature, invariant causal connections, humanities are interested in meanings and
social sciences focus on interactions of motivated actors under economic and
normative conditions. In humanities and social science subjective meanings of
actions and cultural items have an important role, whereas meanings have no use
in physics, chemistry or biochemistry, but in the biology of animals,
motivation and use of messages may have some analogy with human behaviour.
Medicine is based on biochemistry but of course it has many connections to
purposive actions and habits of life.
The success of natural science has brought its mathematical and
empirical methods in the form of statistics to social sciences and medicine,
but when their analyses have stopped in statistics and gone no further, they have
lost their essential capability to make sense of human actions, social
structures and causes of diseases. This is the empiricist fallacy of social
research and medicine. Quantitative methods are the outstanding characteristic
of mainstream research in social sciences and medicine. The main reason for
this is that these methods are well standardized and they provide the best
possibilities for research papers to be published. And in order to survive in
research you have to publish or perish. Statistics is of course a powerful
means of revealing dependencies between the phenomena of the lifeworld, but
those dependencies do not explain anything. If research remains just on the
level of quantified observations without looking at meanings, motives and
conditions behind actions and choices, it does not see them in the right
context of the lifeworld.
Research on culture aims at making sense of its phenomena through
meaning connections and purpose of things. Details are first interpreted through
the overall view given by a preunderstanding. Details enrich the researchers’
understanding and the interpretation framework gets better. Archaeologists digging
on an ancient site probably have some idea about the age of the items found.
For this they can use methods of natural science, C14 isotope, for example.
Carbon and bones indicate that fire has been used to grill meat, a sharp piece
of stone is interpreted as an arrowhead. People who lived there were hunters.
The total picture is put together of small things. This is the hermeneutic
circle in which all humanities move.
The plethora of empiricist research are also cause for much bewilderment
in public debate. It is quite common that the media tell us seemingly
contradictory results about what is good for your health, for example. It is
impossible to make fully controlled experiments on people’s life habits,
because there so many variables involved and many of them unknown. We can
compare what people eat in different cultures, but we cannot directly infer the
differences in their health owing just to their different diets. People have
different lifestyles in many respect, they have more or fewer social contacts,
in a warmer climate they can spend more time outside and enjoy sunshine, they
have more or less stress, and whatever other differences there might be.
Statistics can give valuable indications about possible causes, and
probabilities that are valid for a large population. Statistics can show that
our everyday observations and generalisations are biased when seen in a bigger
picture. At first statistics is often the only reasonable way to bring some
order into existing data, when theoretical concepts are lacking.
Laymen have difficulty in evaluating the validity and relevance of
diverging research results just based on how they are reported in newspapers, which
cannot describe all the conditions of research settings. Also, the headlines
only pick up “the fact” that sells best. This kind of journalism does not necessarily
improve people’s trust in research and leaves room for fantastic antiscientific
speculations. Education should give everybody basic knowledge about the
possibilities and limitations of research in addition to the established
scientific world view.
The lifeworld is the starting point of research. It begins with
wondering and questioning what there is behind the given experiences.
Observations can be refined by statistics, but only theoretical concepts and
insight can really make sense of the phenomena. The chain of links from a theory
to observations can be long. Research of physics, chemistry and cosmology uses
sophisticated gauges, and what researchers “really see” can be digits of
flashes on a screen. These are again interpreted by means of background
knowledge.
Science has freed us from superstitious beliefs simply by showing that
there is a natural explanation for the phenomena that people have wondered
about. Why does the theory of atoms and their energy levels provide a better
explanation to chemical reactions than some mythical spirit? Because the theory
is simpler in the sense that it does not bring into the explanation any extra
elements from outside, we can control and predict the outcome of those
reactions, and we do not need to call up any spirits to do the job. Obviously
science cannot now predict everything, for instance, where and when the next
earthquake will take place, but scientist think that earthquakes are due to
natural causes. In modern society there are still lots of conjurers who deceive
people in order to get their money. And here I am telling, for free, that it does
not pay to throw money to vain hopes. Still there are many who pay. Money obviously
serves as a kind of sacrifice for good spirits. Only they may not be the good
ones and not spirits at all. People are ready to try anything in a desperate
situation, for example when they are sick, and official medicine can often promise
cure only with a certain probability.
Science is a shared effort of the research community, and scientific
knowledge is shared among all of us. Science does not depend on individual
researchers’ brilliant minds, although the work of geniuses has helped science
make enormous advances. It is fashionable to speak of how we humans orient
ourselves in the abundance of information in terms of our brain capacity. For
an individual it is of course a crucial factor, but the limits of the human
brain capacity are not the limits of scientific knowledge. Each generation of
researchers stands on the giants’ shoulders of the previous generations. Nobody
can remember all the details of any field of research. A researcher has the other
results in writing available, when she writes a paper on her own special
interest of enquiry. This stored knowledge is the edifice of science. New
pieces of knowledge contribute to this edifice and gradually, after proper
corroboration, they become the ground stones of our scientific world view. The
construction of this edifice will hardly ever stop, because as long as we have
access to new data there is no end to research and research will set new
questions to be solved. However, science cannot solve all the dilemmas of human
life, because the behaviour of human beings is not totally preconditioned by
their genotype or tradition. I will address these other aspects of the
lifeworld in essays on ethics and arts.
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