Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7474575" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, for what it's worth, I don't think this is just about manners.There's a small matter of usage - if everyone in his day described Joseph Banks as a scientist, and made him President of their most important scientific society for more than 40 years, it seems odd to deny that he is one.But there's also the issue of accurately describing a human practice. Science is a human practice aimed at generating a body of knowledge that is systematised and (in part because of that) disseminable and usable. Hypothesis formation, and testing by way of experiment (= controlled observation and measurement), is one way of generating such knowledge. Careful observation and measurement of natural phenomena is another. Such observation and measurement does at least three things:(i) in itself, it may produce systematised, disseminable and usable knowledge (think of how important scientific cartography, surveying, etc is to much of contemporary life, from road maps and GPS to urban planning to international trade); (ii) it may help with hypothesis formation (eg it seems unlikely that anyone would start thinking about plate tectonics without first having the data provided by scientific cartography); (iii) it may help with hypothesis confirmation or enrichment (eg the way that Joseph Banks' collection and classification of botanical data helps show the utility of, and further develop techniques of, biological categorisation, which are themselves a, perhaps the, major part of biological knowledge before the invention of modern biochemistry over the past 50 to 100 years).The idea that science is equivalent to, in some confined, sense, the scientific method as that is taught in high school or first year lectures, is inaccurate as a matter of history, is misleading about the nature and richness of the bodies of scientific knowledge that have been developed over the past 400-odd years (much longer for astronomy, of course), and leads to a type of methodological fetishism that generates distorted descriptions (eg astronomical observatin gets described as "experimentation" when it obviously is not) and prioritises a certain privileged set of means (the classic chemistry or physics lab) over the actual ends of science (a body of systematised, disseminable and usable knowledge).</blockquote>

Verification