The Culture of Science

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The Culture of Science
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Scientific ideas

• Space, time, matter
• Atoms
• Homogeneous universe
• Laws of nature
• Experiments, observations, facts
• Technology

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Scientific terminology

• Universal measures
• Mathematical language or the imitation of
  mathematical language
• Vocabulary ( stem cells, spaceships, cell-phones,
  nanoparticles, electrons)

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Scientific Ideology

• Constructing a heroic past
• Progress
• Heroes

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Scientists as heroes of the modern world

• 19th century
• Continuous progress
• The Pantheon of Scientists
• B.J. T. Dobbs, Newton as a Final Cause or the
  First Mover
• Positivist images of science

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Positivist image of science

• Science consists of theories
• Theories are tested and confirmed by experiments
• Each new accepted theory is better than the
  previous one because it is closer to the truth
• Scientific progress development- by-
  accumulation (Kuhn)

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• History, if viewed as a repository for more than
  anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive
  transformation in the image of science by which
  we are now possessed. That image has previously
  been drawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly
  from the study of finished scientific
  achievements as these are recorded in the
  classics, and more recently, in the
  textbooksInevitably, however, the aim of such
  book is persuasive and pedagogic a concept of
  science drawn from them is no more likely to fit
  the enterprise that produced them tan an image of
  a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure
  or a language text. This essay attempts to show
  that we have been misled by them in fundamental
  ways. (Kuhn, 1962)

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History of Science

• Continuitist a successive string of theories
  and world pictures, better in some respect than
  their predecessors
• Revolutionary- radical discontinuities

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Discontinuities?
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Our universe?
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Scientific ideologies
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1. The Scientific positivism

• Science consists of theories (laws, observations,
  experiments, explanations, descriptions)
• Theories are tested and confirmed by experiments
• Each new accepted theory is better than the
  previous one because it is closer to the truth
  (or more explanatory)
• Scientific progress development-by accumulation

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Poppers view of science

• Science is a corpus of theories
• Each theory is tested against experiments
• The purpose of experiments is to infirm a theory
• No theory is ever confirmed by experiment. Each
  theory is only a tentative description of the
  reality
• Each theory it will eventually fail and be
  replaced with a better one
• Better closer to the truth

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2. The historicism

• Science does not uniformly progress through
  scientific method
• Science - a historical development
• Scientific theories develop inside paradigms
  (higher rank theoretical models)
• Normal science, science in crisis, revolution
• Incommensurability of paradigms

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• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
  Revolutions, 1962
• Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the
  Infinite Universe, The Astronomical Revolution
  etc.
• Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific
  Thought
• A.C. Crombie, Styles of thinking

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3. The science as a cultural construct

• science will be presumed to be a human cultural
  institution whose interactions with other
  cultural institutions are subject to all of the
  kinds of questions that might be asked of any
  other What interests does it legitimately
  serve? and What interests does it legitimately
  threaten? From this point of view it becomes
  possible both to ask why some group of individual
  within a particular historical context should
  selectively accept elements of the scientific
  tradition and to understand that other groups or
  persons might have legitimate and rational
  grounds for rejecting them. (Olson,1990, p.5)

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• Shaffer, Shapin, Leviathan and the Air Pump, CUP,
  1986
• Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1996
• The Edinburgh School