Comment on Why is science better than the alternative? (And what is that alternative, exactly?)
TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page 1 year ago
The Scientific Method is currently the best way humans have for taking observations about the world and deriving meaning from them. There have been other methods before and it’s entirely probably that there will be another one in the future.
Scientific methodologies provide a framework to develop and analyze experiments. Without one you may end up doing a test and coming out the other side not really knowing what you were testing in the first place. You may also take experimental data and start analyzing it for things that the experiment couldn’t properly capture. This can lead to meaningless or misleading results.
froghorse@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Or, to put it plainly.
Science is a method for getting knowledge. Knowledge of remarkable quality.
It’s key component is a strong reference to observation. IE What you saw, how you saw it, and what your friends saw when they did it too.
So what are other ways of getting knowledge?
What are their pros and cons?
TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page 1 year ago
To get knowledge from scratch there really is only observation. We are pretty limited as human beings, we can only take in information about things we can directly sense, we can sense through indirect observation, or that we can build instruments to sense for us. After that its the same thing I mentioned above, use some method to refine that observation into a repeatable, testable theory.
The bad science that many people try to do is to start with a theory, usually with some social or political agenda attached, and work backward collecting evidence that “supports” it. That’s not a way of gaining knowledge though, it’s just a way of emulating the look and feel of science.
froghorse@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Ok, so we have observation.
We might footnote that observation, offer how we made that observation. I’m not sure what the official term for such would be.
And, if some of our friends are in the same business, we can compare notes. That would also be implied.
I suppose there’s authority, consensus and tradition too. Not as good as science but there is an attraction there.
Any more?
BitSound@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Those aren’t sources of knowledge. They can be a proxy for knowledge obtained through the scientific method. Crucially, you can fact-check them yourself, using the scientific method.