As a researcher, I interact with Science on a daily basis writing papers and grants, mentoring students, crafting research problems, conducting peer-review, and finally in communicating science to students as well as peers. Contrary to popular belief, I do not spend hours debating the various philosophies of Science, rather, I know it at a practical level and conducting science is how I earn my livelihood. Reading this book is one of the few times I engaged in actively thinking about the philosophy of Science.
Unlike most books on science, Thomas theorizes that the most important aspect in the scientific enterprise is the paradigm. He affirms that scientists are interested in expanding the "reach" of a paradigm by devising new explanations and methodologies for applying a paradigm in a specific scenario. He postulates that a paradigm is in crisis only when there are several "faults" --- the instances where a paradigm does not sufficiently explain the observations. This is followed by a phase where there is a huge interest in developing the replacing paradigm. The winner of this battle of paradigms emerges gradually at first, as a result of a first few successful explanations where existing paradigm fails, and then suddenly gets wide scale acceptance. It is not necessary that the replacing paradigm is always better than existing paradigm in all respects; as long as it shows sufficient "promise", it suffices. The job of a scientist in post paradigm replacement stage is to expanding the reach of the new paradigm. The wave and corpuscular theories of light, discovery of oxygen, theories on structure of an atom, classical and relativistic mechanics are used as running examples for demonstrating the paradigm centric notion of science.
I think the book rather gives a fairly accurate and non-glorified description of science. I found the book to be surprisingly honest and straightforward. Often, the public understanding and description of science is far more hagiographic than what it actually is. The endless discussion about the revolutions in science that are "caused" because of "geniuses" like Newton and Einstein tends to drive me up the wall. The over glorification that scientists are always trying to invent the next breakthrough is cartoonish at best and harmful at worst. I do not blame science communicators doing this glorification as they want to narrate a highly dramatic story to attract the maximum number of audience. I believe scientists fall into the same trap because they are competing with science communicators for capturing audience. Needless to say, I am not a fan of such glorification.
Most science conducted by most of the scientists is boring; not to them, but to other people. I don't mean it as a cynical statement, but as a matter of fact. Why should I expect a salesman to be excited about completeness of propositional logic or a store clerk to be thrilled at discovering the decidability of monadic second order logic? Most of scientists are working on solving a specific problem. While solving a problem with very narrow scope might be boring, the cumulative effect of each of these boring problems becomes very impressive. For example, one of the crowning achievements of science in the past 50 years is the dramatic shrinkage in the size of computing devices. A typical smart phone today has more computational power than computers that occupied several rooms. This achievement is not a result of one revolution, but it is a cumulative effect of hundreds and thousands of small scientific, technological, and economic improvements. Thousands of paradigms in various disciplines from computer science, manufacturing, material science, and business models have been revolutionized in this process.
The hagiographic and overly philosophical perspective about science sets up wrong expectations about science. Graduate students learn to solve a specific scientific problem in their initial years, learn to build a series of incremental and cumulative contributions in their middle years, and learn to present a coherent scientific story only in their final years. Not all graduate students are lucky or required to make ground breaking contributions. This whole process of engaging in scientific process make them well prepared for their future scientific challenges. The normal process of conducting science is very useful in measuring the amount of progress made with respect to a scientific hypothesis as well.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book was its take on falsifiability. While in theory, falsifiability is the cornerstone of scientific enterprise, concluding that an entire theory is not "true" because it fails to explain a specific phenomenon is not very "useful". Instead, there is a whole lot of effort to develop ad-hoc mechanisms to explain a few anomalies. This presents us with a very nuanced understanding about truth. Truth is a very loaded term. I feel that a lot of public communication of science is unnecessarily self aggrandizing that science is the search for truth. I don't think so. The extreme emphasis on truth, in my opinion, is the primary reason for the rise of scientism. I think science serves purely an exploratory and explanatory purpose, that is to help humans "understand" the nature. In that aspect, it is very closely related to Nyaya school of philosophy.
One question that Thomas does not answer is the following: why do normal scientists do science? Given that normal science is very boring, and not that glorious, why do scientists choose to conduct science to begin with? I cannot speak for all the scientists out there, but I am personally driven by curiosity. I get to postulate hypothesis, conduct experiments, and change my mind as new results come out. I also get to educate my students on the process of science and sometimes, I also get to educate my peers about an interesting finding. I don't think I can find any better job for myself.
Unlike most books on science, Thomas theorizes that the most important aspect in the scientific enterprise is the paradigm. He affirms that scientists are interested in expanding the "reach" of a paradigm by devising new explanations and methodologies for applying a paradigm in a specific scenario. He postulates that a paradigm is in crisis only when there are several "faults" --- the instances where a paradigm does not sufficiently explain the observations. This is followed by a phase where there is a huge interest in developing the replacing paradigm. The winner of this battle of paradigms emerges gradually at first, as a result of a first few successful explanations where existing paradigm fails, and then suddenly gets wide scale acceptance. It is not necessary that the replacing paradigm is always better than existing paradigm in all respects; as long as it shows sufficient "promise", it suffices. The job of a scientist in post paradigm replacement stage is to expanding the reach of the new paradigm. The wave and corpuscular theories of light, discovery of oxygen, theories on structure of an atom, classical and relativistic mechanics are used as running examples for demonstrating the paradigm centric notion of science.
I think the book rather gives a fairly accurate and non-glorified description of science. I found the book to be surprisingly honest and straightforward. Often, the public understanding and description of science is far more hagiographic than what it actually is. The endless discussion about the revolutions in science that are "caused" because of "geniuses" like Newton and Einstein tends to drive me up the wall. The over glorification that scientists are always trying to invent the next breakthrough is cartoonish at best and harmful at worst. I do not blame science communicators doing this glorification as they want to narrate a highly dramatic story to attract the maximum number of audience. I believe scientists fall into the same trap because they are competing with science communicators for capturing audience. Needless to say, I am not a fan of such glorification.
Most science conducted by most of the scientists is boring; not to them, but to other people. I don't mean it as a cynical statement, but as a matter of fact. Why should I expect a salesman to be excited about completeness of propositional logic or a store clerk to be thrilled at discovering the decidability of monadic second order logic? Most of scientists are working on solving a specific problem. While solving a problem with very narrow scope might be boring, the cumulative effect of each of these boring problems becomes very impressive. For example, one of the crowning achievements of science in the past 50 years is the dramatic shrinkage in the size of computing devices. A typical smart phone today has more computational power than computers that occupied several rooms. This achievement is not a result of one revolution, but it is a cumulative effect of hundreds and thousands of small scientific, technological, and economic improvements. Thousands of paradigms in various disciplines from computer science, manufacturing, material science, and business models have been revolutionized in this process.
The hagiographic and overly philosophical perspective about science sets up wrong expectations about science. Graduate students learn to solve a specific scientific problem in their initial years, learn to build a series of incremental and cumulative contributions in their middle years, and learn to present a coherent scientific story only in their final years. Not all graduate students are lucky or required to make ground breaking contributions. This whole process of engaging in scientific process make them well prepared for their future scientific challenges. The normal process of conducting science is very useful in measuring the amount of progress made with respect to a scientific hypothesis as well.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book was its take on falsifiability. While in theory, falsifiability is the cornerstone of scientific enterprise, concluding that an entire theory is not "true" because it fails to explain a specific phenomenon is not very "useful". Instead, there is a whole lot of effort to develop ad-hoc mechanisms to explain a few anomalies. This presents us with a very nuanced understanding about truth. Truth is a very loaded term. I feel that a lot of public communication of science is unnecessarily self aggrandizing that science is the search for truth. I don't think so. The extreme emphasis on truth, in my opinion, is the primary reason for the rise of scientism. I think science serves purely an exploratory and explanatory purpose, that is to help humans "understand" the nature. In that aspect, it is very closely related to Nyaya school of philosophy.
One question that Thomas does not answer is the following: why do normal scientists do science? Given that normal science is very boring, and not that glorious, why do scientists choose to conduct science to begin with? I cannot speak for all the scientists out there, but I am personally driven by curiosity. I get to postulate hypothesis, conduct experiments, and change my mind as new results come out. I also get to educate my students on the process of science and sometimes, I also get to educate my peers about an interesting finding. I don't think I can find any better job for myself.
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