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15.9: Review of Major Points

  • Page ID
    36310
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    When scientists are trying to gain a deep understanding of how the world works, they seek general patterns rather than specific facts. The way scientists acquire these general principles about nature is usually neither by deducing them from observations nor by inductive generalization. Instead, they think about the observations, then guess at a general principle that might account for them, then check this guess by testing. When a guess or claim is being tested, it is called a hypothesis. Testing can refute a hypothesis. If a hypothesis does not get refuted by testing, scientists retain it as a prime candidate for being a general truth of nature, a law. Hypotheses that survive systematic testing are considered to be proved, although even the proved statements of science are susceptible to future revision, unlike the proved statements of mathematics.

    Scientific reasoning is not discontinuous from everyday reasoning, but it does have higher standards of proof. This chapter reviewed several aspects of scientific reasoning from earlier chapters, including general versus specific claims, testing by observation, testing by experiment, accuracy, precision, operational definition, pseudoprecision, the role of scientific journals, independent verification, consistency with well-established results, reproducible evidence, anecdotal evidence, a scientist’s cautious attitude and open mind, attention to relevant evidence, the scientific method of justifying claims, disconfirming evidence, and the methods of gaining a representative sample.

    Deterministic explanations are preferred to probabilistic ones, and ideal explanations enable prediction of the phenomenon being explained. Explanations are preferred if they are testable and fruitful. A good test requires a prediction that is (1) deducible, (2) improbable, and (3) verifiable.

    Science provides the antidote to superstition. There are criteria that can be used to detect pseudoscience.

    A reasonable scientific explanation is coherent with the paradigm for that science. Only by knowing the science's paradigm can a scientist design a controlled experiment that does not contaminate the controls and that eliminates effects unintentionally caused by the experimenter.

    One final note. In a gesture of good will to humanity, the abominable snowman, the yeti, has agreed to donate his body to pseudoscience.


    This page titled 15.9: Review of Major Points is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Bradley H. Dowden.

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