Today's reading was comparatively brief, but fascinating for a variety of reasons. Brush is responding to Allchin's criticisms of Lawson's "shoehorning" history of science into hypothetico-deductive thought. These articles are discussed and/or cited previously in this blog. The first thing that caught my attention was that Brush makes some statements that are not unlike my own thoughts in this blog, to myself, and verbalized to Dr. Magruder in person during a visit to the collections, all before I actually read this essay. Lawson may be wrong in apparently not providing overwhelming historical evidence to support his points, in particular concerning Galileo and the moons of Jupiter. He may also be wrong if he indeed feels all science must be lumped under hypothetico-deductive reasoning and the scientific method per se. However, I must rise to his defense on a couple of points. I do feel that problem solving in general does typically follow a set of steps or guidelines that subconsciously or knowingly we all follow to seek the answer to a question, whether we are practicing scientists, science students, or in everyday life. This is just how problem-solving, and apparently the human brain usually works. Secondly, I feel philosphers of science are misguided if they feel they must elucidate and put in place one single, over-riding way that science must be accomplished. I am not too fond of absolutism, and stating that there is one definable answer to every question, or one single label to put on everything. It is perfectly acceptable to have different approaches to scientific endeavors, or even different ways of interpreting outcomes or the process by which something happened. To me it's okay if Lawson wants to try to define Galileo's experiments a certain way, as long as he acknowledges the possibility that maybe, historically, that wasn't exactly what Galileo was thinking. I agree with Brush, that as long as scientists don't falsify data for whatever purpose, the important thing is not how they figured something out, but what it is they have determined and its implications and relevance to the paradigms of the time. He gives a wonderful example concerning astronomy and the mapping of the stars in the 19th century. No particular hypotheses were being tested, but the workers accumulated a tremendous database that many others drew from subsequently. Who could suggest these astronomers were not doing science, even if it didn't necessarily fit neatly into a scientific method? I could also apply this line of thought to many of the early herbalists and microscopists I have been reading about recently. Brush makes another important point in that it is the explanation of new or known facts that is most important, not the genesis of the facts. I remember some of my science professors insisted there was no such thing as a single or true scientific method anyway, that to find the answer to a question one employed whatever means necessary, as long as those results could likewise be obtained by others to ensure plausibility and reproducibility. It was also interesting that Max Planck said that sometimes new ideas cannot take hold until the older generation that resists them dies off, and that younger scientists are subject to this type of pressure from established scientists who feel their reputations may be at stake if the ideas they have based their careers on are modified or discarded.
Bibliographic Note:
Stephen G. Brush, "Comments on the Epistemological Shoehorn Debate." Science & Education 13 (2004): 197-200.
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