In article <C5HLBu.I3A@tripos.com> homer@tripos.com (Webster Homer) writes: >mhollowa@ic.sunysb.edu (Michael Holloway) writes: > >>Here's your error.  I really do think this shows some confusion on your >>part.  (Drum roll please)  Science isn't so much the gathering of evidence >>to support an "assertion" (read: hypothesis) as it is the gathering of >>empirical observations IN ORDER TO MAKE AN HYPOTHESIS.  What should >>convince you (or not) shouldn't be the final product so much as *HOW* the >>product was made.  >> >Here's your error. There is no observation or hypothesis that is not tainted >by theory. I have a theory, I make observations, those observations will be >made with my theory in mind.   Yes, absolutely, though I'd make the observation in a more general sense of all observations are made by human beings and therefore made with various biases.   But here your message leaves talk of hypothesis and gets back, once again,  to equating the business of science with the end result, the gizmo produced.  >Science works very well at developing theories >within paradigms, but is very poor at dealing with paradigm shifts. If I  >develop a novel paradigm that explains homeopathy, chinese medicine, or  >spontaneous combustion. If the paradigm is useful it will show me the way >to make observations that "prove" or "disprove" it.  My point isn't so much whether or not you have a novel paradigm but *how*  you come about developing it.  >The paradigm of modern medicine is that the body can be reduced to a set of >essentially mechanical operations wherein disease is seen as malfunctions in >the machinery, essentially the old Newtonian model of the world. It seems >likely that theories based upon this paradigm do not give a complete  >discription of the universe, medicine, healing etc... Indeed we now  >recognize an important psychological component to healing.   Perhaps you'd admit that this is an oversimplification on your part (the topic of the philosophy of science is made for them, I'm making them too) but I think that it also summarizes popular misconceptions of science and the  business of doing science.  Biomedical research doesn't make any basic  assumptions that aren't the same as any other discipline of scientific research.  That is, that you make empirical observations, form an hypothesis and test it.  Modern medicine has much more to do with biochemistry than  "the old Newtonian model of the world".  And I doubt that many psychologists would appreciate being put outside this empirical "world view".  Psychology also has more to do with biochemistry than spoon bending.   >It is also important to distinguish reason from science. Science may be >reasonable, but so are many non-scientific methodologies. Aristotle reasoned >that frogs came from mud by observing one hop out of a puddle.   Oversimplified, of course, but a good example.  This is an empirical observa- tion.  It was then tested, though perhaps not by Aristotle, and eventually  found wanting.  In the meantime, some folk will  have continued to believe in the spontaneous generation of animal life.   There's nothing at all surprising about this, it's the way the gathering of knowledge works.  There are probably more than a few things in my own  discipline of molecular biology that will be found to be totally off-base, even idiotic, to someone in the future.  These future people won't have come to these relevations because they had suddenly gone all Zen-like and had  a vision in an LSD trip.  Someone will have thought of something new and  tested it.  This is the bit that people who seem to relish misrepresenting science and research can't seem to wrap their minds around.  Science is a  creative process.  What I think of as factual and good research can be totally turned on its head tommorrow by new results and theories.