‘The Ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly test and retest each others results’ – To What extent would you agree with this claim in the natural and human sciences.
Human beings are inherently flawed creatures. Through faults in reason and sense perception we interpret the world not as it truly is. Both the Human and Natural Sciences are tools to understand the world and are a lens in which to comprehend ideas not readily available to us purely through common sense logic and sense perception. The implications made in the title are that the inductive scientific method, when removed from error and bias, provides unequivocal and unobjectionable objective truth. The
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Assumptions in the title of this essay imply that results, theories and laws resulting from the current system of peer review multiple perspectives produce completely infallible objective truth, this is a false premise. Whilst the group of knowers known as the scientific community have collectively less bias than one lone knower trying to understand the universe, there is still collective and engrained level of institutional bias. The same problems of confirmation bias and expectation are present in a group of knowers just as they are with one single knower. According to Karl Popper (1902-1994) the best way to eliminate any expectation and confirmation bias was to falsify and disprove rather than confirm one’s hypothesis and predictions. Popper argues: no matter how convincing an argument or theory is, all that is needed to disprove it is one piece of valid counterclaiming evidence. Whilst this theory is valid on an individual level, it really becomes an effective tool in the objectivity of science on a large scale. Despite this attempt at objectifying and ‘protecting against’ error and bias it is inadequate due to inherent flaws in the scientific method. Induction, moving from the specific to the general, is the key element in scientific logic. Any theory or law ‘proved’ through this logic has some key flaws: the main flaw being that inductive logic can never be certain of any event happening or of any prediction. Richard van de Lagemaat
Kathryn Schulz argues in “Evidence”, a chapter of her book called Being Wrong, that we need to “learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it” (Schulz, 377”). By attending to counterevidence we can avoid making errors in our conclusions.
Barry opens his nonfiction text by emphasizing that certainty is a confident resilience while uncertainty produces frailty, but in a way that sends out opposite outcomes. He enhances this purpose by constantly using repetition with the word uncertainty to amplify how scientific research is an uncertain apparatus. By way of illustration,
One issue that Carl Hempel addresses in his book, “Philosophy of Natural Science,” is an argument that scientist should provisionally accept a hypothesis that is confirmed, although not proven, is completely warranted. This argument is driven by the theory that if a hypothesis has successfully passed many different tests, then it should completely reasonable to accept even if it may eventually change or dismissed as determined incorrect. Either way, a confirmed test should lead to successful and positive results and possible a future complete and accurate answer. I agree with his argument and believe that scientists can rationally accept hypotheses as I will discuss in further detail throughout this paper. Hempel believed in “Sophisticated
Every day, there are scientist/ researchers conducting experiments, or studies, in order to try and prove facts about everyday life. In conducting these experiments, there are the normal, ethical experiments that have continuously gone to prove many different facts that most of us might have not even noticed about ourselves or one another, and then there are the few experiments that are deemed to be unethical and, although still have shown and proved to us different facts about ourselves, really can not be replicated once again because of the amount of controversy caused by them. The experiments and studies such as the Stanley Milgram Obedience experiment, the Stanford Prison and Guards experiment, the Bystander Effect, the David Reimer
Karl Popper expands this idea by saying that what makes something scientific is the concept of it being falsifiable, rather than a method that results in absolute truth (Jogalekar, 2014). This means that in order for a theory to be scientific it has to have the possibility of being tested to be false or incorrect. According to Popper, this is also
Researchers recognize reproducibility as the core of science and the path to cumulative knowledge (Freedman et al., 2015,2,3. Reproducibility reflects the fundamental
One of the key principles in empirical science is distinguishing whether incoming novel theories are actually scientific or non-scientific. This is referred to as the problem of demarcation. Many different ideas have been proposed in response to this problem in order to demarcate theories and amongst some of the most well-known ones are those of Rudolph Carnap and Karl Popper. Carnap proposes that theories be declared scientific based on whether they can be tested, at least in principle, and labels this his verification criteria. Popper’s method is based on whether a theory has empirical content which is the set of all possible excluded events proposed by a theory. The question is, is it possible to agree with both of these criteria? This
It has long been the project of philosophers to elucidate just what it is that makes a method of inquiry science. The question is this: how can we tell if a theory, or set of theories, constitutes science? What is the principle by which a claim about the nature of things can be said to be scientific? And just as importantly, how can we know what sort of things are not? Popper attempted to answer this question of demarkation between science and non-science by proposing a criterion for distinguishing the former from the latter. Falsifiability, he claimed, is what makes a hypothesis scientific. To say
Students essays were defined into the category of “genetic technologies 17.2% had a incomplete understanding of the category (Long) The inheritance of traits is one of the most complex process and unique in the creation of new life. Many people believe that skills or muscle or thing learned and developed over time in their life can be passed on to their child. This essay will explain how our knowledge on inheritance has changed and how are inherited, and some reason why people misconception is inaccurate. There are many factors that affect what the baby will look like.
In the effort to delineate between science and pseudoscience, a necessary set of factors by which to differentiate between the two, a set of “criteria of demarcation” becomes necessary. In the 20th century, several modern philosophers made attempts to outline criteria of demarcation, with differing results and reasoning, but several important similarities. Both Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos argued against the paradigm (no Kuhnian pun intended) of verificationism, which asserted that positive proof in favor of a scientific hypothesis adds credence to that hypothesis, and that a sufficient body of empirically supporting observations can indeed “prove” a theory. Popper fervently rejects the notion of verificationism as a criterion of demarcation in his creation and support of falsificationism, wherein only one refuting instance may condemn a theory, and only by a failure to disprove a theory can it be supported, not proven. As a modification of falsificationism, Imre Lakatos’ more relaxed definition of the criteria of demarcation between science and pseudoscience still supports the view that a sufficient number of refutations may constitute rejection of a theory, but argues for a more lenient treatment of fledgling scientific theories
Imagine you are sitting in a lab just to watch your dad work on this new science project of his. When you accidently spill the glass of water next to his computer. You caused him to start over, but good news is he was looking at experiment all wrong. Mistakes can have a huge effect on science. Mistakes teach scientists how to make the object better, people who make the mistakes are remembered in the future, and great discovers that affect human kind are made. Mistakes are a key part of discovery.
The article on the subject of potential communicable disease coercion to Europe was written by scientists who carried out research to identify these diseases and come up with measure to mitigate the catastrophe in future. The scientist hypothesis states that current trends of Europeans from three perspectives that are social and demographic change, globalization and environmental change and health system capacity are driving factors for identified plausible infectious diseases to be more problematic than they currently are.
Scientists convey their work as being impartial because research follows a systematic approach to reach the goal of absolute truth. However, how scientific theory and data is formed and interpreted is more subjective than one
Sir Popper's piece, "Science: Conjectures and Refutations," reaffirms the scientific methods currently in use. No scientific theory is ratified without serious consideration and careful observation. Science is the pursuit of what can be proven false and the resulting assumptions of what must be true.
Over time, experts in all disciplines have experienced instances where a lack of consensus is derived from the exact same information. Whether bipartisan or plural, these disagreements are the result of the varied ways knowers interpret knowledge; objectivity is extremely difficult to reach, if not impossible. Within the natural sciences, fundamental disagreements develop due to the adoption of conflicting theories and alternate methodologies. Moreover, individual and analytical biases can skew the interpretation of data, leading to contrasting conclusions or understanding.