Many issues damage the relationship of science to the media and the use of science and scientific arguments by
politicians. As a very broad generalisation, many politicians seek certainties and
facts whilst scientists typically offer probabilities and caveats. However, politicians' ability to be heard in the
mass media frequently distorts the scientific understanding by the public. Examples in the
United Kingdom include the controversy over the
MMR inoculation, and the 1988 forced resignation of a Government Minister,
Edwina Currie, for revealing the high probability that
battery farmed eggs were contaminated with
Salmonella.
[69]
John Horgan,
Chris Mooney,
and researchers from the US and Canada have described Scientific
Certainty Argumentation Methods (SCAMs), where an organization or think
tank makes it their only goal to cast doubt on supported science because
it conflicts with political agendas.
[70][71][72][73]
Hank Campbell and microbiologist Alex Berezow have described "feel-good
fallacies" used in politics, especially on the left, where politicians
frame their positions in a way that makes people feel good about
supporting certain policies even when scientific evidence shows there is
no need to worry or there is no need for dramatic change on current
programs.
[74]: Vol. 78, No. 1. 2–38
Science and the public
Various activities are developed to facilitate communication between the general public and science/scientists, such as
science outreach,
public awareness of science,
science communication,
science festivals,
citizen science,
science journalism,
public science, and
popular science. See
Science and the public for related concepts.
Science is represented by the 'S' in
STEM fields.
Philosophy of science
Working scientists usually take for granted a set of basic
assumptions that are needed to justify the scientific method: (1) that
there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers; (2) that
this objective reality is governed by natural laws; (3) that these laws
can be discovered by means of systematic observation and
experimentation.
[15] Philosophy of science seeks a deep understanding of what these underlying assumptions mean and whether they are valid.
The belief that scientific theories should and do represent
metaphysical reality is known as
realism. It can be contrasted with
anti-realism, the view that the success of science does not depend on it being accurate about unobservable entities such as
electrons. One form of anti-realism is
idealism, the belief that the mind or
consciousness is the most basic essence, and that each mind generates its own reality.
[nb 16] In an idealistic
world view, what is true for one mind need not be true for other minds.
The Sand Reckoner
is a work by Archimedes in which he sets out to determine an upper
bound for the number of grains of sand that fit into the universe. In
order to do this, he had to estimate the size of the universe according
to the contemporary model, and invent a way to analyze extremely large
numbers.
There are different schools of thought in philosophy of science. The most popular position is
empiricism,
[nb 17]
which holds that knowledge is created by a process involving
observation and that scientific theories are the result of
generalizations from such observations.
[75] Empiricism generally encompasses
inductivism,
a position that tries to explain the way general theories can be
justified by the finite number of observations humans can make and hence
the finite amount of empirical evidence available to confirm scientific
theories. This is necessary because the number of predictions those
theories make is infinite, which means that they cannot be known from
the finite amount of evidence using
deductive logic only. Many versions of empiricism exist, with the predominant ones being
Bayesianism and the
hypothetico-deductive method.
[77]:p236
Empiricism has stood in contrast to
rationalism, the position originally associated with
Descartes, which holds that knowledge is created by the human intellect, not by observation.
[77]:p20 Critical rationalism is a contrasting 20th-century approach to science, first defined by Austrian-British philosopher
Karl Popper.
Popper rejected the way that empiricism describes the connection
between theory and observation. He claimed that theories are not
generated by observation, but that observation is made in the light of
theories and that the only way a theory can be affected by observation
is when it comes in conflict with it.
[77]:pp63–7 Popper proposed replacing verifiability with
falsifiability as the landmark of scientific theories and replacing induction with
falsification as the empirical method.
[77]:p68
Popper further claimed that there is actually only one universal
method, not specific to science: the negative method of criticism,
trial and error.
[78] It covers all products of the human mind, including science, mathematics, philosophy, and art.
[79]
Another approach,
instrumentalism, colloquially termed "shut up and multiply,"
[80] emphasizes the utility of theories as instruments for explaining and predicting phenomena.
[81]
It views scientific theories as black boxes with only their input
(initial conditions) and output (predictions) being relevant.
Consequences, theoretical entities, and logical structure are claimed to
be something that should simply be ignored and that scientists
shouldn't make a fuss about (see
interpretations of quantum mechanics). Close to instrumentalism is
constructive empiricism,
according to which the main criterion for the success of a scientific
theory is whether what it says about observable entities is true.
Paul Feyerabend advanced the idea of
epistemological anarchism, which holds that there are no useful and exception-free
methodological rules governing the
progress of science or the growth of
knowledge
and that the idea that science can or should operate according to
universal and fixed rules are unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to
science itself. Feyerabend advocates treating science as an
ideology alongside others such as
religion,
magic, and
mythology, and considers the dominance of science in society
authoritarian and unjustified. He also contended (along with
Imre Lakatos)
[discuss] that the
demarcation problem of distinguishing science from
pseudoscience on objective grounds is not possible and thus fatal to the notion of science running according to fixed, universal rules. Feyerabend also stated that science does not have evidence for its philosophical precepts, particularly the notion of
uniformity of law and process across time and space.
[83]
Finally, another approach often cited in debates of
scientific skepticism against controversial movements like "
creation science" is
methodological naturalism. Its main point is that a difference between natural and
supernatural explanations should be made and that science should be restricted methodologically to natural explanations.
[nb 18]
That the restriction is merely methodological (rather than ontological)
means that science should not consider supernatural explanations
itself, but should not claim them to be wrong either. Instead,
supernatural explanations should be left a matter of personal belief
outside the scope of science. Methodological naturalism maintains that proper science requires strict adherence to
empirical study and independent verification as a process for properly developing and evaluating explanations for
observable phenomena.
[84] The absence of these standards,
arguments from authority, biased
observational studies and other common
fallacies are frequently cited by supporters of methodological naturalism as characteristic of the non-science they criticize.