ABSTRACT
Just as in Chapter 1 we asked about the nature of philosophy and gave some sort of general answer, so now we try to do the same thing for science. In the case of philosophy, we were attempting to set the scene for a discussion of various aspects of philosophical analysis which will take us into some of the traditional problems such as ontology and epistemology to our central theme of meaning and then to a more scientific approach to meaning and behaviour, but before that we should ask: What is science? What is scientific method? What is a scientific explanation?We shall try to use some of our philosophical techniques — the critical and the formative (more logical) as well as the clarifactory and the evidential. But we start by describing science in its simpler role of a hypothetico-deductive system where much of what is dealt with its reasonably repetitive (periodic or cyclic) and subject to fairly clearcut ‘scientific laws’ which we can discover.Science (or scientific method) is sometimes thought of as the 30
process of collecting facts. It is certainly true that fact-collecting plays an important part in science, but it is by no means the whole of what is involved. Just as important as fact-collecting is the setting up of theories, theoretical structures, models, etc., which allow the use of both deductive and inductive logic in the widest sense of those terms. What we must do now is to outline each of the various steps involved in the total scientific process, explaining each as far as is necessary for an understanding of what science entails, and how it in turn relates to explanation.It should be made clear from the start that in talking of scientific method we are taking a global look at the process, and it does not by any means follow from this that any particular scientist at any particular time is involved in the whole of this global process. The chemist doing experiments in his laboratory, or the biologist inspecting tissues under a microscope may only be involved in a small part of the total activity of theory construction and logical reasoning, although often he is more involved than he might appear (even to himself) to be at first sight. It is also true that the scientific steps involved at any particular time in the scientist’s work are not always made explicit to the external observer, or are not even always made explicit to the scientists themselves. Our description is normative in that we are describing what we believe the “reasonable” scientist ought to do. We shall also, as will be seen, eventually take a much broader view of science than may appear at first sight.There is a lot of debate as to the nature of scientific method, and what we are asserting here is initially fairly general and does not dwell on particular, detailed arguments - although we shall consider one later in the form of Meaning Variance. Most of what has filled many books on logic and scientific method has been about the detail of the subject, precisely how hypotheses are confirmed under certain restricted conditions, and precisely what sort of experimental controls are suitable for some set of observations. They are also concerned with the nature of evidence, and what makes a statement acceptable as (relevant) evidence. We are not concerned with that degree of detail in this first section of the chapter; we are only concerned with a “broad
brush” description of the scientific processes.Scientific procedures can be thought of in terms of two principal (sets of) operations which can occur in either order and therefore will arbitrarily select the deductive procedure first for discussion. Given a set of assumptions, whether these be set out explicitly as postulates in a formal system (AS) such as the Propositional or Functional Calculus, or whether they are implicit and merely stated in ordinary language, or indeed whether they be in some sort of special symbolic form as in organic chemistry (or biochemistry), they represent the starting point for the making of deductive inferences. A deductive inference is based on the language which is used to describe that part of the system we are interested in, it being obvious that science is partitioned into various sub-departments all of which are a part of the totality of human knowledge, but nevertheless are somewhat specialised and often thought of under their specialised names of chemistry, physics, etc.The process of deduction is one of drawing logical inferences from assumptions. From these inferences further statements are generated, sometimes called theorems in a formal system, which apply to the system being described. Deduction itself is an inferential process which refers to the conclusions that follow from the assumptions. Some deductive inferences are sometimes made in very complex circumstances and can involve statistical and probabilistic methods of inference as well as (conventional) logical ones. The deductive process is very much embedded in the “language” (whether natural or formal) in which descriptions of processes occur. There are also logical inferences which can be very complicated when viewed against a background of, say, the syllogism or the sorites. Let us remind ourselves of particular inference-making situations; what one might call logical acts.It was Harre (1970) among others who has quite rightly drawn attention to the myth of deduction. The myth lies in the matching of logical and natural ordering in all cases. It is implicit in what we say later in this chapter about scientific explanation in Hempelian terms that “the explicandum must be a logical consequence of the explanans”.
