The Principles of Science – By MStranslate

Background

Science might be associated with lab coats, test tubes, questionnaires or maze learning shocks but it goes much deeper than its depiction in popular culture.

Science can be maddeningly frustrating or breathtakingly exhilarating; it can involve horrendous hours or the happiest of collaborations.  It can be boring or beautiful, splendid or a slog.  Let’s explore some aspects of the activity to which many people dedicate their lives.

Knowing what something means is not the same as understanding it.  Most people can describe a snake or a storm but these descriptions will not explain snakes or storms.

And it is the shift from describing to explaining that is one of the aims of science.  Explaining something reflects understanding, and this understanding supports predictions that can then be tested in ways that are defined as ‘scientific’.

Science represents many things and the presence or absence of these things determines whether the science is ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘sort of (quasi)’ or ‘false (pseudo)’.

To investigate this in more detail, we can group these things into three broad categories – principles, methods and values and then explore a few elements.  In this article (Part 1 of 3), we’re going to first look at the principles of science.

Principles

Some of the defining principles of science include:

Evolving

Science isn’t fixed or absolute but evolving and relative.  Emerging evidence builds on past efforts and adds to or modifies our current understanding.

Progress is mostly incremental – adding a small piece to a very large jigsaw – but big breakthroughs can occur.

When a scientist thinks they know it all, they have stopped being a scientist!

Falsifiable

Evidence must be produced in such a way and take such a form that enables others to assess whether it is true or false.

This element separates science from belief or opinion – if something cannot potentially be disproved, it falls outside of science.

Conservative

The starting point for all scientific endeavours is that the status quo applies.  It is more than semantics to design an experiment on the proposition that a treatment effect does not exist.

Science operates on the basis that the null hypothesis (there is no difference) is accepted or rejected.

Evidential

Science is constrained by evidence in two ways.  Firstly, you can’t go beyond evidence to add more detail when these details aren’t supported by their own evidence – you might establish that CEOs exhibit sociopathic tendencies but you then can’t say anything about their voting intentions or nutritional preferences (even if you believe that sociopaths eat more grapes).  This is going beyond science.

Secondly, evidence constrains science by staying within the specific context of the evidence.  If the CEO study only included only men or people over 55 years of age, you can generalise the results to all male CEOs or all CEOs over 55 years of age (with the demonstrated support of inferential statistics).

But you can’t reach conclusions about female CEOs or younger CEOs as you have no empirical basis for this generalisation.