THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
SCIENCE ASKS THREE BASIC QUESTION:
1. What’s there?
2. How does it work?
3. How did it come to be this way?
PRINCIPLE OF SCIENCE
• Seeks to explain the natural world.
• Assumes that this is possible by gathering evidence about it.
SCIENCE IS A PROCESS• Ideas are developed through
reasoning and experiments.
• Scientific claims are based on testing explanations against observations of the natural world and rejecting the ones that fail the test.
• Subject to peer review and replication.
• Scientific conclusions are well supported by facts and are tentative only in the sense that all ideas are open to scrutiny
• Science is not democratic: ideas are accepted/rejected
• based on evidence not what people think
• Science is non-dogmatic. In science things are not accepted on faith but on evidence.
• Science cannot make moral or aesthetic decisions.
SCIENCE CORRECTS ITSELF.
• Theories are central to scientific thinking:
Theory
- Popular meaning: a guess
- In science: a well-substantiated explanation of events observed in the natural world
Fact
• A natural phenomenon repeatedly confirmed by observation.
Law
• A description of how a natural phenomenon will occur under certain circumstances.