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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7474102" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's doing the same sort of work as "per se" or "ipso facto".Eg hitting a ball with a bat is not per se sport, but it can be if certain other conditions are satisifed.If the other conditions are internal to the hitting of the ball with the bat, then we're talking about some instances of hittings, diestinguished by their internal properties and relations.The features I mentioned as making careful observation and measurement science are not external conditions. They are internal to the observation and measurement.Without more, I'm also not persuaded that it would be science.Science connotes not only a method, but also an output: a contribution to the stock of human knowledge, which is systematically generated and hence (in some fashion) systematically recoverable and disseminable.As you describe it, I'm also not sure what your "experiments" would consist in other than careful observation and measurment. What properties of the cup, or of the grains, are you suggesting you would be investigating?EDIT: I also checked <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks" target="_blank">the Wikipedia page on Joseph Banks</a>, to see if it confirmed my own recollections:[A]n English naturalist, botanist and patron of the natural sciences. Banks made his name on the 1766 natural history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage (1768–1771), visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and, after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of President of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical gardens. . . . From his mother's home in Chelsea he kept up his interest in science by attending the Chelsea Physic Garden of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and the British Museum, where he met Daniel Solander. He began to make friends among the scientific men of his day and to correspond with Carl Linnaeus, whom he came to know through Solander. As Banks's influence increased, he became an adviser to King George III and urged the monarch to support voyages of discovery to new lands, hoping to indulge his own interest in botany. . . . In 1766 Banks was elected to the Royal Society, and in the same year, at 23, he went with Phipps aboard the frigate HMS Niger to Newfoundland and Labrador with a view to studying their natural history. He made his name by publishing the first Linnean descriptions of the plants and animals of Newfoundland and Labrador. . . . Banks was appointed to a joint Royal Navy/Royal Society scientific expedition to the south Pacific Ocean on HMS Endeavour, 1768–1771. . . . The voyage went to Brazil, where Banks made the first scientific description of a now common garden plant, bougainvillea . . . While they were in Australia, Banks, Daniel Solander and the Finnish botanist Dr. Herman Spöring Jr. made the first major collection of Australian flora, describing many species new to science. . . . Banks arrived back in England on 12 July 1771 and immediately became famous. He intended to go with Cook on his second voyage, which began on 13 May 1772, but difficulties arose about Banks' scientific requirements on board Cook's new ship, Resolution. The Admiralty regarded Banks' demands as unacceptable and without prior warning withdrew his permission to sail.It seems that at least a number of scientists of his day regarded Banks's careful observation and measurement as constituting a contribution to scientific knowledge. And I personally regard the idea that one of the more significant enlightenment scientists, who was famous for his scientific endeavours and was a long-serving president of the Royal Society, was in fact not a scientist generating scientific knowledge, as a counterexample to the mooted definition of science and scientist that produce that result.</blockquote>

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