-----Original Message-----
From: Durant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Saturday, August 29, 1998 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: It's our final exam
>
>> Of course you don't like "either/or" answers. 99.9999999% of the people
>> don't like "either/or" answers because humans evolved into
metaphysicians --
>> not scientists.
>
>So scientists are a separate species? I don't think so, they seem to
>be able to breed with non-scientists...
Brown-eyed people can breed with blue-eyed people too. How many scientists
do you know personally Eva?
WHAT IS SCIENCE?
" ...science is no longer the specialized activity of a professional elite.
Nor is it a philosophy, or a belief system, or, as some postmodernist
thinkers would have it, just one world view out of
a vast number of possible views. It is rather a combination of mental
operations, a culture of illuminations born during the Enlightenment four
centuries ago and enriched at a near-geometric
rate to establish science as the most effective way of learning about the
material world ever devised. The sword that humanity finally pulled, it has
become part of the permanent world culture
and available to all.
"Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized
systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses
the knowledge into testable laws and
principles. Its defining traits are first, the confirmation of discoveries
and support of hypotheses through repetition by independent investigators,
preferably with different tests and analyses; second, mensuration, the
quantitative description of the phenomena on universally accepted scales;
third, economy, by which the largest amount of information is abstracted
into a simple and precise form, which can be unpacked to re-create detail;
fourth, heuristics, the opening of avenues to new discovery and
interpretation." [Wilson]
Jay
