U2 THE METHODS OF SCIENCE Flashcards
What are the 2 areas of scientific activity?
Private (libraries, officies and laboratories) and public area (publishing of results and assesment of collegues)
What is Peer-review?
When other scientitst check your work, results and do suggestions before publishing your work
Scietific community…
is constantly inmmersed in a cycle for production and consumption of publications and the knowledge obtained is “reflexive” and “retro-acitve”
What does the cyle of procution and consumption of publications consist on?
Scientisit should:
- base their studies on previos work by collegues
- read these studies
- do new reserach from their results and publish their own
Meritocracy. How do sciensits try to be recognized among their collegues?
- relevence of their inquieries and quesitions proposed
- accuracy of the methodology employed
- precision of the obtained results
What does organized skepticisim consist on?
Always putting into quesion the results obtained with out caring whose it is
What do you obtain at the end of the proces of organized skepticism?
Public recognition and social consensus
Scientific work is
to discriminate between qcceptable and unaccepntable results, falsifications are usually detected immediately
What is key when evalutating results?
- Previous knowledge of the subject
- The behaviour of the scientific community
What happens to a large part of the information generated?
It is thrown away, specially the one thar is created in the periphery of scientific community
Where does data come from and what does it reveal?
Sensorial perception and reveals information about nature
What os one of the most important challenges faced by the international scientific community?
The standardizing the units of measurement
How can data be obtained?
Through obseravtion and experimentation
What does observation consist on?
Maintaning the natural conditions for the event under study
“Normal science”
Made up of prevailing paradigms in the field of science
“Crisis”
When the paradigm is put into question due to an accumulation of anomalies
“Revolution”
The weakening of the paradigm which causes a change in the paradigm and, in the long term, creates a new “normal science”
What is science articulated on?
- Forms of social commitment
- Production techniques
- Political management
“Paradigm”
Made up of supposed general theories of the laws and the techniques adopted by members of a scientific community
What does the paradigm establish?
The rules needed to legitimise scientific works (ej. cell theory, which is the base of other studies
What are theories?
Structured totalities, outside which observations make no sense
Difference between Popper and theory as structure?
Theories are relativist and discontinious pholosofical models, because their validity depends on the historical and social framework
What are the 2 principles of falsifiablity (Karl Popper)?
- Obseravation is guided by theory
- Aboslute verification of a law is impossible as it is logically unsustainable to claim to make an infinite amount of observations
What do scientific statements need to be in order to be considered scientific?
Statments must necessarily be “falsifiable”
Popper proposes that…
- Theories that do not overcome observational and experimental test should be eliminated and replaced with ones that are more credible
- Even of we can not confirm that a theory is true, we can ssy that is “best available”
What do reaserchers provoke in the inductive method and what to they use it for?
Non spontaneus events to observe them, measure the variables and acquire new knowledge
Apart form provoking a non spontaneus event what does the procedure include in the inductive method?
- Formulation of a hypothesis
- Experimentation
- Empirical validation
The deductive method (trial and error) creates hypothesis that, one validated, become:
- Types and patterns: joint presentation of natural events
- Laws: relationship between variables
- Theories: systematic explanations that refer to a field of nature and coherently origanuze a set of laws
- Models or representations: simplifications of reality that are considered to be reasonable
What is scientific knowledge is “built” form?
Observation and experimentation
What does the inductive method postulate?
- Science starts with observation
- Inductive REASONING is objective and valid
- Observation offers a secure foundation for scientific knowledge
Inconsistencies of the inductive method?
- Subjectivity of observation which are consitioned by the observers’ expecations
- Impossibility of generalization
- Difficulty in forming observational statments, as they cannot be expressed within existing theories
Through what are observational statements expressed?
(ejemplo del ear lobe)
Through the concepts and terms of a theory. (Observations and experimentations are carried out to validate or clarify a theory)
Types of scientific instrumnets?
- passive: measuring observations
- active: that create new events in the laboratory
How do instruments tend to be presented in scientific articles?
As unproblematic tools
What are “black boxes”?
Instruments that are not well understood by the scientists who use them
What is “tactic knowledge”?
does not appear explicilty in publications and is only acquired through close collboration with there creators
Why does “tactic knowledge” become a problem?
It impedes the reproduction of experiments with those who haven’t had prolonged contact with the work-groups
The use of scientific instruments imply…
the acceptation of the theories involved in the use of the instruments
