Even the most prestigious scientists have occasionally refused to accept new theories despite there being enough accumulated evidence to convince others. In the long run, however, theories are judged by their results: When someone comes up with a new or improved version that explains more phenomena or answers more important questions than the previous version, the new one eventually takes its place.
Science as an enterprise has individual, social, and institutional dimensions. Scientific activity is one of the main features of the contemporary world and, perhaps more than any other, distinguishes our times from earlier centuries.
Scientific work involves many individuals doing many different kinds of work and goes on to some degree in all nations of the world. Men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds participate in science and its applications. As a social activity, science inevitably reflects social values and viewpoints.
Before the twentieth century, and well into it, women and people of color were essentially excluded from most of science by restrictions on their education and employment opportunities; the remarkable few who overcame those obstacles were even then likely to have their work belittled by the science establishment. The direction of scientific research is affected by informal influences within the culture of science itself, such as prevailing opinion on what questions are most interesting or what methods of investigation are most likely to be fruitful.
Elaborate processes involving scientists themselves have been developed to decide which research proposals receive funding, and committees of scientists regularly review progress in various disciplines to recommend general priorities for funding. Science goes on in many different settings. Scientists are employed by universities, hospitals, business and industry, government, independent research organizations, and scientific associations.
They may work alone, in small groups, or as members of large research teams. Their places of work include classrooms, offices, laboratories, and natural field settings from space to the bottom of the sea. Because of the social nature of science, the dissemination of scientific information is crucial to its progress.
Some scientists present their findings and theories in papers that are delivered at meetings or published in scientific journals. Those papers enable scientists to inform others about their work, to expose their ideas to criticism by other scientists, and, of course, to stay abreast of scientific developments around the world. The advancement of information science knowledge of the nature of information and its manipulation and the development of information technologies especially computer systems affect all sciences.
Those technologies speed up data collection, compilation, and analysis; make new kinds of analysis practical; and shorten the time between discovery and application. Organizationally, science can be thought of as the collection of all of the different scientific fields, or content disciplines.
From anthropology through zoology, there are dozens of such disciplines. They differ from one another in many ways, including history, phenomena studied, techniques and language used, and kinds of outcomes desired.
With respect to purpose and philosophy, however, all are equally scientific and together make up the same scientific endeavor. The advantage of having disciplines is that they provide a conceptual structure for organizing research and research findings.
The disadvantage is that their divisions do not necessarily match the way the world works, and they can make communication difficult. In any case, scientific disciplines do not have fixed borders.
Physics shades into chemistry, astronomy, and geology, as does chemistry into biology and psychology, and so on. New scientific disciplines astrophysics and sociobiology, for instance are continually being formed at the boundaries of others. Some disciplines grow and break into subdisciplines, which then become disciplines in their own right.
Universities, industry, and government are also part of the structure of the scientific endeavor. University research usually emphasizes knowledge for its own sake, although much of it is also directed toward practical problems. Universities, of course, are also particularly committed to educating successive generations of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Industries and businesses usually emphasize research directed to practical ends, but many also sponsor research that has no immediately obvious applications, partly on the premise that it will be applied fruitfully in the long run.
The federal government funds much of the research in universities and in industry but also supports and conducts research in its many national laboratories and research centers. Private foundations, public-interest groups, and state governments also support research.
Funding agencies influence the direction of science by virtue of the decisions they make on which research to support. Other deliberate controls on science result from federal and sometimes local government regulations on research practices that are deemed to be dangerous and on the treatment of the human and animal subjects used in experiments.
Most scientists conduct themselves according to the ethical norms of science. The strongly held traditions of accurate recordkeeping, openness, and replication, buttressed by the critical review of one's work by peers, serve to keep the vast majority of scientists well within the bounds of ethical professional behavior. Sometimes, however, the pressure to get credit for being the first to publish an idea or observation leads some scientists to withhold information or even to falsify their findings.
The computer science class is easy. The science class is boring. I'm really bad at Biology and Science in general. What can I do to improve? A right circular cylinder is changing shape. When the radius is 4 inches and the height is 6 inches, how fast. Which of the following statements regarding the early childhood teacher's science background is true?
A It is not necessary for the early childhood teacher to have a science background, she can learn as she goes.
As long as the. Hi I am in grade 10 , I am doing maths physical science, life science and geography, what jobs can I get into with those subjects. The diagram below represents a phase change. Which of the following best describes what is happening in the diagram? Important thematic questions are: How gradual or rapid is scientific change? Is science really revolutionary?
How radical is the change? Are periods in science incommensurable, or is there continuity between the first and latest scientific ideas? Is science getting closer to some final form, or merely moving away from a contingent, non-determining past?
What role do the factors of community, society, gender, or technology play in facilitating or mitigating scientific change? The most important modern development in the topic is that none of these questions have the same answer for all sciences.
When we speak of scientific change it should be recognized that it is only at a fairly contextualized level of description of the practices of scientists at rather specific times and places that anything substantial can be said.
Nonetheless, scientific change is connected with many other key issues in philosophy of science and broader epistemology , such as realism, rationality and relativism. The present article does not attempt to address them all. We begin with some organizing remarks.
It is interesting to note at the outset the reflexive nature of the topic of scientific change. A main concern of science is understanding physical change, whether it be motions, growth, cause and effect, the creation of the universe or the evolution of species. These philosophical views are then reflected back, through the history and philosophy of science, as images of how science itself changes, of how its theories are created, evolve and die.
Models of change from science—evolutionary, mechanical, revolutionary—often serve as models of change in science. This makes it difficult to disentangle the actual history of science from our philosophical expectations about it. And the historiography and the philosophy of science do not always live together comfortably.
Historians balk at the evaluative, forward-looking, and often necessitarian, claims of standard philosophical reconstructions of scientific events.
Philosophers, for their part, have argued that details of the history of science matter little to a proper theory of scientific change, and that a distinction can and should be made between how scientific ideas are discovered and how they are justified. Beneath the ranging, messy, and contingent happenings which led to our current scientific outlook, there lies a progressive, systematically evolving activity waiting to be rationally reconstructed. Conversely, what one takes to be the demarcating criteria of science will largely dictate how one talks about its changes.
What part of human history is to be identified with science? Where does science start and where does it end? The breadth of science has a dimension across concurrent events as well as across the past and future. That is, it has both synchronic at a time and diachronic over time dimensions.
Science will consist of a range of contemporary events which need to be demarcated. But likewise, science has a temporal breadth: a beginning, or possibly several beginnings, and possibly several ends. The synchronic dimension of science is one way views of scientific change can be distinguished. On one hand there are logical or rationalistic views according to which scientific activity can be reduced to a collection of objective, rational decisions of a number of individual scientists.
On this latter view, the most significant changes in science can each be described through the logically-reconstructable actions and words of one historical figure, or at most a very few.
According to many of the more recent views, however, an adequate picture of science cannot be formed with anything less than the full context of social and political structures: the personal, institutional, and cultural relations scientists are a part of. We look at some of these broader sociological views in the section on social process of change. We will begin with the most influential figure for history and philosophy of science in North America in the last half-century: Thomas Kuhn.
For an introduction to the most influential philosophical accounts of the diachronical development of science, see Losee When Kuhn and the others advanced their new views on the development of science into Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science, history and sociology were already an important part of the landscape of Continental history and philosophy of science. A discussion of these views can be found as part of the sociology of science section as well. The article concludes with more recent naturalized approaches to scientific change, which turn to cognitive science for accounts of scientific understanding and how that understanding is formed and changed, as well as suggestions for further reading.
Science itself, at least in a form recognizable to us, is a twentieth century phenomenon. Although a matter of debate, the canonical view of the history of scientific change is that its seminal event is the one tellingly labeled the Scientific Revolution.
It is usually dated to the 16th and 17th centuries. The first historiographies of science—as much construction of the revolution as they were documentation—were not far behind, coming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Professionalization of the history of science, characterized by reflections on the telling of the history of science, followed later. We begin our story there. As history of science professionalized, becoming a separate academic discipline in the twentieth century, scientific change was seen early on as an important theme within the discipline.
Rupert Hall , radical conceptual transformations came to play a much more important role. One of the early outcomes of this interest in change was the volume Scientific Change Crombie, in which historians of science covering the span of science from the physical to the biological sciences, and the span of history from antiquity to modern science, all investigated the conditions for scientific change by examining cases from a multitude of periods, societies, and scientific disciplines.
What were the essential changes in scientific thought and how were they brought about? What was the part played in the initiation of change by mutations in fundamental ideas leading to new questions being asked, new problems being seen, new criteria of satisfactory explanation replacing the old?
What was the part played by new technical inventions in mathematics and experimental apparatus; by developments in pure mathematics; by the refinements of measurement; by the transference of ideas, methods and information from one field of study to another? What significance can be given to the description and use of scientific methods and concepts in advance of scientific achievement?
How have methods and concepts of explanation differed in different sciences? How has language changed in changing scientific contexts? What parts have chance and personal idiosyncrasy played in discovery? How have scientific changes been located in the context of general ideas and intellectual motives, and to what extent have extra-scientific beliefs given theories their power to convince? What value has been put on scientific activity by society at large, by the needs of industry, commerce, war, medicine and the arts, by governmental and private investment, by religion, by different states and social systems?
To what external social, economic and political pressures have science, technology and medicine been exposed?
Are money and opportunity all that is needed to create scientific and technical progress in modern society? Crombie, , p. These were fundamental changes that overturned not only the reigning theories but also carried with them significant consequences outside their respective scientific disciplines. In most of the early work in history of science, scientific change in the form of scientific revolutions was something which happened only rarely.
This view was changed by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn whose monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions came to influence philosophy of science for decades. Kuhn wanted in his monograph to argue for a change in the philosophical conceptions of science and its development, but based on historical case studies.
The notion of revolutions that he used in Structure included not only fundamental changes of theory that had a significant influence on the overall world view of both scientists and non-scientists, but also changes of theory whose consequences remained solely within the scientific discipline in which the change had taken place.
This considerably widened the notion of scientific revolutions compared to earlier historians and initiated discussions among both historians and philosophers on the balance between continuity and change in the development of science. In the British and North American schools of philosophy of science, scientific change did not became a major topic until the s onwards when historically inclined philosophers of science, including Thomas S.
Kuhn , Paul K. Feyerabend , N. The occupation with history led naturally to a focus on how science develops, including whether science progresses incrementally or through changes which represent some kind of discontinuity. Similar questions had also been discussed among Continental scholars. In France, the historian and philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard also noted that what Kant had taken to be absolute preconditions for knowledge had turned out wrong in the light of modern physics.
These conditions were still required for scientific reasoning and therefore, Bachelard concluded, a full account of scientific reasoning could only be derived from reflections upon its historical conditions and development. Based on the analysis of the historical development of science, Bachelard advanced a model of scientific change according to which the conceptions of nature are from time to time replaced by radical new conceptions — what Bachelard called epistemological breaks.
Beyond the teacher-student connections, there are other commonalities which unify this tradition. In North America and England, among those who wanted to make philosophy more like science, or to import into philosophical practice lessons from the success of science, the exemplar was almost always physics.
The most striking and profound advances in science seemed to be, after all, in physics, namely the quantum and relativity revolutions. But on the Continent, model sciences were just as often linguistics or sociology, biology or anthropology, and not limited to those. What we as humans know, how we know it, and how we successfully achieve our aims, are the guiding questions, not how to escape our human condition or situatedness. Foucault described his project as archaeology of the history of human thought and its conditions.
Hence, in his analysis of the development of the human sciences from the Renaissance to the present, Foucault described various so-called epistemes that determined the conditions for all knowledge of their time, and he argued that the transition from one episteme to the next happens as a break that entails radical changes in the conception of knowledge.
For a detailed account of the work of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucalt, see Gutting One of the key contributions that provoked interest in scientific change among philosophers of science was Thomas S. History was expected to do more than just chronicle the successive increments of, or impediments to, our progress towards the present. Instead, historians and philosophers should focus on the historical integrity of science at a particular time in its development, and should analyze science as it developed.
Instead of describing a cumulative, teleological development toward the present, history of science should see science as developing from a given point in history. Kuhn expected a new image of science would emerge from this diachronic historiography. In the rest of Structure he used historical examples to question the view of science as a cumulative development in which scientists gradually add new pieces to the ever-growing aggregate of scientific knowledge, and instead he described how science develops through successive periods of tradition-preserving normal science and tradition-shattering revolutions.
The predominant phase is normal science which, while progressing successfully in its aims, inherently generates what Kuhn calls anomalies. In brief, anomalies lead to crisis and extraordinary science, followed by revolution, and finally a new phase of normal science. Normal science is characterized by a consensus which exists throughout the scientific community as to a the concepts used in communication among scientists, b the problems which can meaningfully be formulated as relevant research problems, and c a set of exemplary problem solutions that serve as models in solving new problems.
In normal science, scientists draw on the tools provided by the disciplinary matrix, and they expect the solutions of new problems to be in consonance with the descriptions and solutions of the problems that they have previously examined. But sometimes these expectations are violated. Problems may turn out not to be solvable in an acceptable way, and then instead they represent anomalies for the reigning theories.
Not all anomalies are equally severe. Some discrepancy can always be found between theoretical predictions and experimental findings, and this does not necessarily challenge the foundations of normal science. Not all studies are created equal and the scientific literature is flooded with uninformative papers.
If Dr. Orlok recruits ten people, puts them on a bat wing diet and only follows up on their cancer status for a year, he can still get published. Probably not in The New England Journal of Medicine , but given the existence of over 28, scientific journals, someone somewhere will publish this. How to recognize low-quality studies? They can lack a control group, they can have too few participants, their follow-up may be too short.
But the conclusions that can be drawn from them are not reliable. But maybe he forgets to check on asbestos exposure in these groups, given that asbestos is also a risk factor for lung cancer.
This allows him to put his best foot forward. Maybe he never publishes a particular project because the results were negative and scientific journals tend not to be interested in the publication of negative results.
There are bad incentives in scientific research which can unfortunately nudge scientists away from diligence. Maybe Dr. Orlok ran a study designed to look at the rates of colorectal cancer in bat-wing-eating individuals… but when the results were in, he spontaneously decided to also look at diabetes. Studies are designed around an outcome measure e. Now it would be one thing for the corporation to give Dr.
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