Science

Science (from scientia, Latin for "knowledge") has come to mean a body of knowledge, or a method of study devoted to developing this body of knowledge, concerning the universe gained through repeated observation and experimentation. See scientific method. Exactly what constitutes science and scientific methods are subjects studied by the philosophy of science.

Science or rather scientific laws and theories rest upon certain assumptions. One principle in particular is induction. Roughly, the principle of induction is a presupposition that the sequence of events in the future will occur as they always have in the past or that things in the universe will always act in the same way under the same conditions. For example, by induction, the theory of gravity implies that a rock, given certain conditions in time and space, will always fall to the earth just as rocks and other objects in the sky have done in the past. It is by the assumption of induction that a scientific law or theory derives its primary strength to predict future events and explain past ones. David Hume first attacked this assumption in what is known as the problem of induction.

Implicit in science's devotion to acquiring knowledge about the universe is an assumption that there is a reality that exists independent of a mind (or minds) perceiving it. This view, scientific realism, holds that the subjects (atoms, animals, gravity, stars, wind, microbes, etc.) of science and the properties science ascribes to them exist independent of observation. Under this view, the (approximate) truth of scientific knowledge is taken at face value. Some of the precepts of science under this view can be quite extraordinary to a non-scientific mind in light of every day common observation. Atomic theory, for example, implies that a granite boulder which appears to human sense as heavy, hard, solid, grey, etc. is (under one scientific interpretation) actually a combination of subatomic particles moving very rapidly in an area consisting mostly of space. Philosophers have distinguished between these two types of properties (heavy and solid versus particles in motion) attributable to entities in the universe by various names; Immanuel Kant coined the phrases phenomena (the universe as humans experience it) and noumena (things-in-themselves). While science seems to confer an ontological status on entities beyond mere sense-data (another modern term for phenomena), scientific realism, however, is not necessary to science. One form of instrumentalism, for example, posits that while scientific entities, such as atoms, help explain and predict sense-data, these entities do not necessarily exist. This approach is particularly favored by some especially when it comes to committing to the ontological status of a scientific entity which may seem unobservable in principle.

In contrast to Kant's views (and despite wide acceptance that human perception of phenomena is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the universe as it really is), some scientists assert that it is possible to understand and accurately explain (at least somewhat if not fully) the universe (or noumena, in Kant's terms) using the scientific method to hone accurate scientific theories and laws. Scientists also place their trust in the scientific method in hopes that it will strip empirical investigation and scientific knowledge of unjustified biases. The extent to which scientific assumptions have not been philosophically justified, plumb the weakness of science. However, despite some weak philosophical underpinnings, science has successfully challenged less scientific interpretations of the universe. Further, whether science has or will solve the mysteries of the universe, it has at the very least been the springboard for technological advances in medicine, engineering, communications and beyond. For some the success of science confers an almost religious reverence on itself.

Until the Enlightenment, and even after that to some extent, "science" (or its Latin cognate) meant any systematic or exact, recorded knowledge (and the word continues to be used in this sense sometimes). "Science" therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that "philosophy" had at that time. There was a distinction between, for example, "natural science" and "moral science," which latter included what we now call philosophy, and this mirrored a distinction between "natural philosophy" and "moral philosophy." More recently, "science" has come to be restricted to what used to be called "natural science" or "natural philosophy," and further distinctions have been drawn within it, such as physical science, biological science, and social science.

Fields of science are also distinguished in terms of hard or soft science. A distinction driven by the subjects of the science and the remarkably different scientific approaches in explaining those subjects. Physical and biological sciences, for example, are models of hard science and the social sciences are models of soft science (although some social scientists object to the soft science label). Some scientists in the hard sciences consider all scientific-like fields of study outside of the hard sciences (including the soft sciences) not to be true science, or even relegate them to the realm of pseudoscience. Mathematics is still very often considered a science simply because it is exact and careful; but it is often not thought of as an example of a science because it is not aimed at empirical knowledge.

The term "science" is sometimes pressed into service for new and interdisciplinary fields that make use of scientific methods at least in part, and which in any case aspire to be systematic and careful explorations of their subjects, including computer science, library and information science, and environmental science. Mathematics and computer science reside under "Q" in the Library of Congress classification, along with all else we now call science.

Physical & Biological Sciences

Organization and practice of science: International Council of Science (ICSU)

See History of Science and Technology for an understanding of how these fields came to be. See also scientists for catalogs of people active in each of these fields.

For any science, it is possible to create a catalog of observations of phenomena which are the data of the science, see optical phenomenon. Some phenomena can simply be observed; others are only observable through the use of sophisticated devices or by use of statistics. Experiments are designed in order to make significant observations of phenomena.

References

Alphabetized and ordered list of sciences adapted from the Internet-Encyclopedia article, "Science" Internet-Encyclopedia March 14, 2003