- What is science?
- Characteristics of science
- Origin of science
- Branches of science
- The scientific method and its steps
- Scientific knowledge
We explain what science is, its origin, branches and characteristics. Also, what is the scientific method and scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is obtained through observation and / or experimentation.What is science?
Science is the set of knowledge organized, hierarchical and verifiable, obtained from the observation of the natural phenomena Y social of the reality (both natural and human), and also of the experimentation and empirical demonstration of the interpretations we give them.
This knowledge is also recorded and serves as a basis for future generations. So science nurtures itself, questions, refines, and accumulates over time. weather.
In the concept of science, different knowledge is contained, techniques, theories and institutions. All this, in principle, aims to discover what are the fundamental laws that govern reality, how they do it and, if possible, why.
It is a cultural product of the humanity modern, perhaps one of the most celebrated and recognized in its history, whose roots have nevertheless been with us since the Antiquity classical.
Science is a model of thought inspired by human rationality and the critical spirit, philosophical values that had their heyday from the Renaissance European. This is why the profound philosophical and cosmological changes that took place between the 16th and 17th centuries are often referred to as the Scientific revolution.
Characteristics of science
In all its complexity, science is characterized by the following:
- Aspire to discover the laws that govern the universe that surrounds us, through methods rational, empirical, demonstrable and universal. In that sense, it values objectivity and methodicality, and moves away from subjectivities.
- Analyze your objects of study both quantitative What qualitatively, although not always go to experimental models of verification (depending on the subject).
- It is based on the research, that is, in a critical and analytical spirit, as well as in the steps established by the scientific method, to formulate laws, models and scientific theories that explain reality.
- It generates a significant amount of specialized knowledge that must be questioned and then validated by the scientific community itself, before being accepted as true or valid.
- It is made up of a significant number of branches or specialized fields of knowledge, which study natural phenomena, formal or social, and that as a whole make up a unified whole.
Origin of science
Galileo Galilei questioned religious knowledge through science.
The word "science" comes from Latin scientia, which translates "knowledge", but its use to refer to the critical study of nature is recent: in the nineteenth century the British William Whewell (1794-1866) began to use the term "scientist" to refer to those who practiced what all life was called "philosophy", "naturalism", "natural history" or "natural philosophy", that is, the study of the laws of nature.
In fact, under some of these names the scientific knowledge, that is, the interest in finding out how things in the world work and why. But in antiquity the scientific search was inseparable from religious thought, since mythology and magic were the only forms of explanation available to him. human being.
This changed significantly in the Classic Greece, when the philosophy: a doctrine of non-religious thought, whose purpose was to reflect and try to find the answers in a logical way. The great Greek philosophers were also "scientists" in some way, because together with the logic formal and existential thought cultivated the math, medicine and naturalism, that is, the observation of nature.
Aristotle's dissertations (384-322 BC), for example, were held to be unquestionable truth for centuries. They ruled even throughout the medieval Christian, in which religious discourse once again dominated Western thought.
Around the 15th century the Renaissance took place and new minds began to question what the biblical texts dictated. Confidence in the rational and empirical interpretation of the evidence increased, producing an important break that allowed the gradual birth of science.
Many Renaissance and post-Renaissance thinkers played a very important role in this, influenced by the Humanism that, for the first time, convinced humanity that it could find its own answers to the eternal questions about the why of things. The names of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), René Descartes (1596-1650), Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727), among others, stand out.
Thus was formally born the scientific thought that was gaining more and more relevance in the cultural order of the society. In fact, from the eighteenth century on, he profoundly and radically transformed it in combination with the technique, thus creating the technology and starting the Industrial Revolution.
Branches of science
Science encompasses a huge set of organized knowledge, which is distributed along three main branches, which are:
- Natural Sciences. This is the name given to all those scientific disciplines that are dedicated to the study of nature, using the scientific method to reproduce experimentally (that is, under controlled conditions) the phenomena in which they are interested. They are also known as experimental sciences, hard sciences or physical-natural sciences, and are an example of this: biology, the physical, the chemistry, the astronomy, the geology, etc.
- Formal sciences. Unlike the natural sciences, the formal ones are not dedicated to studying nature, but purely abstract objects and systems, which however can be applied to the real world. Thus its objects of study exist only in the world of the mind, and their validity derives not from experiments, but from axioms, reasonings and inferences. Examples of this type of science are: math, the logic, the computing, etc.
- Social Sciences. Also known as human sciences, this set of disciplines is dedicated to the study of humanity, but preserving an empirical, critical perspective, guided by the scientific method.Thus, they move away from the humanities and the world of subjectivity, but also from the experimental world, turning instead to statistics, transdisciplinarity and analysis of speech. Examples of this type of science are: sociology, the anthropology, the Political Sciences, the economy, the geography, etc.
The scientific method and its steps
It is known by this name to a methodology characteristic of scientific thought, initially proposed by Sir Francis Bacon, but the result of years of rationalist and empirical thought, and of the collaboration of later thinkers, such as David Hume (1711-1776) or William Whewell (1794-1866), to name only two names.
This method requires the construction of knowledge according to criteria of falsifiability or refutability (that is, that it can be subjected to potential tests that contradict it) and of reproducibility or repeatability (that is, that others can make a verification more than once and find the same result).
The steps of the scientific method are as follows:
- Observation. Go find the phenomenon you want to study in your context natural, to thus obtain data and information with which to analyze it.
- Hypothesis. Formulation of a tentative or "working" explanation that allows us to continue investigating the nature of the phenomenon, already having a address and an interpretive possibility.
- Experimentation. Carry out tests, already in a environment controlled (for example, a laboratory), to replicate the phenomenon and to be able to study its internal mechanisms or its responses to certain modifications.
- Theory. Resume the most probable hypothesis and proceed to explain it according to the experimental results and the total information obtained, giving meaning to the phenomenon within the scientific framework of the time.
- Conclusions.. The final conclusions of the formulated theory are expressed.
Scientific knowledge
Scientific knowledge encompasses the set of verifiable facts and supported by evidence that science considers valid at a given moment of its history. It is a set of laws, theories and Models for the interpretation and explanation of the phenomena of reality. Although they are duly documented and subjected to specialized judgment, they are also open to reinterpretation and rebuttal.
This means that scientific knowledge updates itself, sharpening its perspectives, discarding outdated looks, and keeping itself in a constant state of verification. That is why it differs greatly from other doctrines interpretation of reality, such as religion, in which knowledge is tight and unquestionable.
Other qualities of scientific knowledge:
| simple | Clear | systematic |
| legal | specialized | objective |
| factual | critical | predictive |
It must be borne in mind that the validity of scientific knowledge is not permanent or unquestionable, but they are considered as such as long as they are not refuted. The knowledge obtained is constantly being contrasted and questioned.
Scientific knowledge is organized based on a hierarchy of principles, which differentiates between:
- Theoretical hypothesis. An unverified statement, but in principle acceptable or credible, that is formulated when addressing a problem from a scientific point of view, which implies data collection and prior information.
- Scientific law. A proposition that establishes a relationship between a cause and effect, proposing a formal language to demonstrate it. In it the ideal of the scientific method is carried out: formulation of the hypothesis, observation, experimentation and demonstration.
- Scientific theory. An explanation that is formulated from a set of principles or laws, to give coherent meaning to empirical observations. It is a totalizing abstraction, that is, an empirical interpretation supported by the laws. In this sense, a scientific theory already always has real and proven support, and should not be understood as "one more theory" or "one theory among many", in the sense in which we use the word theory.
- Scientific model. A conceptual or visual representation of knowledge, which allows to analyze, simulate or explore the operation of scientific theories in a given context. Scientific models are clippings of reality that allow us to put into motion what is established in the previous theories and hypotheses.