What is Science?

My thoughts on this commonly discussed issue

The topic of "what is science?" keeps coming up on socionics forums. Often people inadvertently narrow science to the scientific method. Are they one and the same? The scientific method is commonly understood as follows [source]:

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

Missing from this list (and from many peoples' awareness) is the final step — the formulation or re-formulation of a theory that provides a unified explanation for a set of phenomena that have been studied and tested. A theory is a view of reality that has withstood experimental testing and logical criticism.

The scientific method was formulated during the 17th and 18th centuries during the rise of the modern physical sciences [Wikipedia article]. Was there no science before that? Indeed there was, but it looked somewhat different: observation/description + explanation. The need for rigorously testing explanations was not widely recognized. This can be attributed to a lack of measuring instruments due to the low level of technological development. The growth of technology made it much easier to gather quantative data and systematically test hypotheses. One might say that today social scientists are in the process of looking for instruments for measuring social phenomena.

In the broader sense I would say that science is about describing and explaining reality. A large portion of scientists never engage in experiments, but simply describe facts and collect data over the span of their careers. This is the stuff biology textbooks are filled with. This data can be categorized and studied without experimentation. In a sense each categorization has an implied explanation. Other scientists — theoreticians — spend their careers examining theories and hypotheses and providing logical support or criticism. Not every scientist by far is engaged in experimentation. I recommend David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality, for a discussion of the explanatory nature of science (see right). In particular, he maintains that the purpose of science is to provide explanations, not predictions, and that each explanation contains implied predictions, but not vice-versa.

The scientific method, then, is a way of sifting through explanations in search of the best ones. People have an intuitive sense of what constitutes a good explanation, and some explanations are discarded without experimentation because they are immediately recognized as being less useful. In today's world, we might say that a 'field of study' becomes a science when it reaches the stage where the scientific method can be applied in full measure. Hitches can arise at any stage of the scientific process. For example, there might be difficulties in formulating hypotheses non-ambiguously; or, there might be difficulties in transferring knowledge to other specialists so that they can perform equivalent experiments.

This second problem is a characteristic of the arts, where transferring knowledge takes years of study and apprenticeship. Socionic typing today is clearly an art, because even if a socionist attempts to write down all his principles for typing, there is still a large mass of tacit (unmanifest, implied) knowledge that has not been or cannot be committed to paper, and other socionists who apply his written methodology literally will not get the same typing results. Broadly speaking, any human skill falls into the category of poorly transferable knowledge, though the skill itself can be studied scientifically. In the hard sciences, knowledge can be expressed in written form and understood literally. This is the goal human knowledge has been striving for over the past few centuries and especially during the Information Age. You might say knowledge is striving to rid itself of the 'skill factor' and be expressed in objective, non-ambiguous form.

Back to the original question...
I see science as something broader than simply application of the scientific method. Basically, the essence of science is attempting to describe and explain phenomena. To take the next step one would have to convey descriptions and explanations to others in written form, which requires expressing tacit knowledge explicitly and hence expending quite a bit of mental effort. The next step is applying the scientific method, which allows one to make the move from learning and study — which have existed as long as written language has — to empirical science, possibly the greatest achievement of mankind's collective thinking to date.

This is an interesting and complex topic, and I expect to write more on it in the future. (5/24/2006)