Which ones of these are sciences?

[brenden]

Hi everyone,

I'm doing aresearch project on the public understanding of science.

I'd like to knowwhat you think constitutes a true scientific study. What aspects of a studymake it scientific?

Which topics countas true sciences from the following category and why?

anthropology,biology, chemistry, economics, math, physics, political science, psychologyphilosophy, sociology, statistics (include any others I've forgotten)

 

Any comments arehelpful, even sarcastic ones pointing out previous posts that covered thistopic.

 

Thanks

 

 

Edited October 27, 2012 by brenden

[ajb]

I'd like to knowwhat you think constitutes a true scientific study. What aspects of a studymake it scientific?

 

A piece of research is scientific if it follows the scientific method. Taken from the Oxford English Dictionary;

 

a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

 

In modern science, one uses the philosophy of the scientific method to guide the methodology of the research. The important notion here is that of falsifiability, which is largely due to Karl Popper.

 

Basically, scientific hypotheses must, at least in principle, be testable and thus allow the possibility of being shown false.

 

The only ones you list that I can really comment on are physics and mathematics.

 

Physics is a science, one constructs mathematical models and compares them with nature. If the models agree well with observation then the model is good. If it does not agree well, then the model is modified and retested or disregarded.

 

 

One issue with modern physics is that today quite a lot of it is theory driven rather than rooted in observations. String theory is a great example of this. This is why lots of people will claim that string theory is not scientific. However my view is that it should be seen as "work in progress" that may be useful in describing nature. Because there are no concrete predictions nor experimental evidence right now does not make it necessarily unscientific. String theory is in principle testable, just right now we don't fully understand what it is trying to tell us.

 

Mathematics is an interesting one and the debate will go on forever. I claim that mathematics is a science as one uses a modified version of the scientific method. Also the day to day practices of mathematicians is closer to science than anyone would like to admit.

 

In physical sciences one collects experimental evidence and uses this to support or refute a theory or hypothesis. This will involve lots of experiments, collecting examples, finding out the limits of the theory and so on.

 

In mathematics one is not constrained to agree with nature in the same way. However, one has ideas, that start out as conjectures, that are tested. One may construct examples and counter examples; these are our "experiments".

 

Ultimately one is looking to show that these conjectures are true. They become theorems if one can find a proof. A proof is a series of mathematically consistent steps starting from some assumed statements that establish the truth of a theorem.

 

The difference between mathematics and physical sciences is really in what we are testing against and what we mean by proof. But much of the general philosophy overlaps.

 

Many mathematicians will probably disagree with me...

[imatfaal]