Scientifique

Science is, to a large extent, tragically misunderstood. The misunderstanding, however, isn't crucial or crippling in its nature or scope - it's merely conceptual, as I see it - but a conceptual confusion is often indicative of and capable of producing some more fundamental difficulties. It's certainly not my particular area of expertise to explain to anyone what overhanging theories dominate the playing field of, say, chemical theory today, but I think people fail to understand certain goals, methods, and applications of scientific research. I'm going to try, in my hopelessly ill-informed state, to explain what I mean, why this is a problem, and how we can fix it.

First and foremost, a scientific theory is descriptive in nature rather than prescriptive. While this seems obvious if seriously considered, I feel that it's often not seriously considered. When asked to explain why a certain scientific theory (or, if well established enough, law) - let's say gravity - is true, many will appeal to the person who discovered, formulated, and applied it. But why did this person cook up this theory? What question was he or she trying to answer? In Newton's case, he reasoned that something must be drawing objects toward the ground, and was dissatisfied with Aristotle's conception (which held that, in a nutshell, things composed of earth were drawn to the earth - ridiculous to us, yes, but this was the best available explanation at the time).
What's important to note here is that Newton did not really discover anything - rather, he described something. The law of gravity was not floating around in space waiting for someone to grab onto it - it was created by a man toward the end of describing an observable phenomenon. This is not, of course, to discredit Newton. Contrarily, I find it more impressive that someone could formulate such a theory rather than pick it off of some idea tree. People are sometimes a bit jolted by this idea, but it really isn't too strange to us. When we're children, we explain things in ways that we now find silly in light of our newer, better explanations. However, our newer explanations aren't necessarily the right ones (truthfully, nothing we postulate is likely totally true - we have cognitive limits, i.e., we can only grasp so much about a given thing at a given moment). The bottom line is that this description rather than discovery concept is the way it happens. Euclidean Geometry stood for a very, very long time, and it's what we still use in our day-to-day dealings with length, angles, and other such measurements. But we've found out relatively recently that Euclidean Geometry just isn't true in all cases. If you find this little tidbit interesting, I highly recommend reading up on it...very cool stuff.

Second, science does not prove things, but seeks to disprove. The fact that it often does more or less prove a theorem to be the case (to our knowledge) is highly convenient icing on the cake. Anyone familiar with experimental procedure past high school science class can tell you that the vast majority of serious experiments are set up such that you are not explicitly setting out to prove an experimental hypothesis, but to disprove a null hypothesis. In other words, your null hypothesis states that there is no significant finding in your data, and you are trying to prove that wrong. This may seem like a nit-picky thing to discuss, but it is very, very important if conceived of in full scope.
Take medicine for example. We've grown accustomed to this deterministic view of the practice of medicine in a way that, when we get sick, we want to go see a doctor, and we're quite sure that she will know exactly what we have, and exactly what to give us to treat it. And if she doesn't know exactly what to do...well...we get a bit flabbergasted, and maybe a little upset. But why? The answer, I think, is that we have this implicit expectation of science - this misunderstanding I'm talking about. We fail to realize that any sort of science attempts to rule out alternative explanations in choosing the best one - once the best answer to a given question or set of questions is found, it can be kept ready for when those sorts of questions arise. But it isn't always that easy; especially in medicine. Doctors don't run dozens of tests on people for fun. Moreover, how many times have you had several tests over the course of an hour or two, finally resulting in the doctor giving you an antibiotic because your "white blood cell count is high," or something like that? This often means you have some sort of infection, and they don't know what, so they gave you the Swiss Army Knife of drugs in hopes of it doing something (and kudos to antibiotics...they really do work wonders).

Finally, we need to understand that science carries with it an array of assumptions. I'll be as brief as possible here, because I could go on for pages, but it's worth mentioning. For one, it assumes there are truths in the world of experience to be found, and that we can come to understand them. It also assumes that the scientific method (observe, experiment, report) is the best way to go about this. This is, in no way, me railing against the scientific enterprise or the medical community (though I occasionally do, for very different reasons). I'm instead frustrated with people who expect researchers and doctors to have all the answers. In terms of whittling down all the available information in all the possible causal relationships in this world, we are a very long way from having even a big chunk of the answers. Science is a tool of discovery, but it's more accurate to think of it as a magnifying glass than some all-encompassing database. We often find new information and have to change our conception of the world around us, and even sometimes our most fundamental assumptions. This should not be discouraging, in my opinion, and is the main reason I feel that scientific inquiry is truly distinguished from, say, intuitive learning. The point of science is to revise itself when mistaken - and you can rest assured that it is mistaken quite often.