The latter two terms also are well worth looking at in more detail because they are used differently by scientists and the general public, which can cause confusion when scientists talk about their work. In common parlance, theory is often used to refer to something that is rather speculative. This definition strongly contrasts with the definition of theory as it is used in science: a theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses.
The term hypothesis is good to define in this discussion as well: a hypothesis is an idea that we can test with further scientific observations. With these definitions in mind, a simplified version of the scientific process would be as follows. A scientist makes an observation of a natural phenomenon.
If the test falsifies the hypothesis i. If the hypothesis is corroborated i. True skepticism is, as [Carl] Sagan described it, the 'self-correcting machinery' of science," Mann said. The phrase " nature versus nurture " also gives scientists a headache, because it radically simplifies a very complicated process, said Dan Kruger, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan.
Genes may influence human beings, but so, too, do epigenetic changes. These modifications alter which genes get turned on, and are both heritable and easily influenced by the environment. The environment that shapes human behavior can be anything from the chemicals a fetus is exposed to in the womb to the block a person grew up on to the type of food they ate as a child, Kruger said. All these factors interact in a messy, unpredictable way. Does it mean statistically significant, or does it mean important?
In statistics, something is significant if a difference is unlikely to be due to random chance. But that may not translate into a meaningful difference, in, say, headache symptoms or IQ. The term has become synonymous with being virtuous, healthy or good. But not everything artificial is unhealthy, and not everything that's natural is good for you.
Natural's sibling "organic" also has a problematic meaning, he said. While organic simply means "carbon-based" to scientists, the term is now used to describe pesticide-free peaches and high-end cotton sheets, as well. But though these words may be routinely misunderstood, the real problem, scientists say, is that people don't get rigorous science education in middle school and high school.
As a result, the public doesn't understand how scientific explanations are formed , tested and accepted. What's more, the human brain may not have evolved to intuitively understand key scientific concepts such as hypotheses or theories, Kruger said.
If enough evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis , it moves to the next step — known as a theory — in the scientific method and becomes accepted as a valid explanation of a phenomenon.
Tanner further explained that a scientific theory is the framework for observations and facts. Theories may change, or the way that they are interpreted may change, but the facts themselves don't change.
Tanner likens theories to a basket in which scientists keep facts and observations that they find. The shape of that basket may change as the scientists learn more and include more facts. The University of California, Berkley, defines a theory as "a broad, natural explanation for a wide range of phenomena. Theories are concise, coherent, systematic, predictive, and broadly applicable, often integrating and generalizing many hypotheses.
Cases of reuse, or repurposing of empirical results in different epistemic contexts raise several interesting issues for philosophers of science. For one, such cases challenge the assumption that theory and value ladenness confines the epistemic utility of empirical results to a particular conceptual framework. Ancient Babylonian eclipse records inscribed on cuneiform tablets have been used to generate constraints on contemporary geophysical theorizing about the causes of the lengthening of the day on Earth Stephenson, Morrison, and Hohenkerk This is surprising since the ancient observations were originally recorded for the purpose of making astrological prognostications.
Nevertheless, with enough background information, the records as inscribed can be translated, the layers of assumptions baked into their presentation peeled back, and the results repurposed using resources of the contemporary epistemic context, the likes of which the Babylonians could have hardly dreamed. Furthermore, the potential for reuse and repurposing feeds back on the methodological norms of data production and handling. In light of the difficulty of reusing or repurposing data without sufficient background information about the original context, Goodman et al.
Indeed, they advocate for sharing data and code in addition to results customarily published in science. As we have seen, the loading of data with theory is usually necessary to putting that data to any serious epistemic use—theory-loading makes theory appraisal possible.
But it is important to note the useful travel of data between contexts is significantly aided by foresight, curation, and management for that aim. Such metadata includes information about theoretical assumptions that are made in data collection, processing, and the presentation of empirical results. Thus, the enriched view of evidence supports the idea that it is not despite the intertwining of the theoretical and empirical that scientists accomplish key epistemic aims, but often in virtue of it ibid.
In addition, it makes the epistemic value of metadata encoding the various assumptions that have been made throughout the course of data collection and processing explicit. When data are repurposed in novel contexts, they are not only shared between subjects, but can in some cases be shared across radically different paradigms with incompatible theoretical commitments.
One of the important applications of empirical evidence is its use in assessing the epistemic status of scientific theories. However, further philosophical work ought to explore the variety of ways that empirical results bear on the epistemic status of theories and theorizing in scientific practice beyond these. It is natural to think that computability, range of application, and other things being equal, true theories are better than false ones, good approximations are better than bad ones, and highly probable theoretical claims are better than less probable ones.
One way to decide whether a theory or a theoretical claim is true, close to the truth, or acceptably probable is to derive predictions from it and use empirical data to evaluate them. Hypothetico-Deductive HD confirmation theorists proposed that empirical evidence argues for the truth of theories whose deductive consequences it verifies, and against those whose consequences it falsifies Popper , 32— But laws and theoretical generalization seldom if ever entail observational predictions unless they are conjoined with one or more auxiliary hypotheses taken from the theory they belong to.
When the prediction turns out to be false, HD has trouble explaining which of the conjuncts is to blame. If a theory entails a true prediction, it will continue to do so in conjunction with arbitrarily selected irrelevant claims. HD has trouble explaining why the prediction does not confirm the irrelevancies along with the theory of interest.
The idea is roughly that an explanation of the evidence that exhibits certain desirable characteristics with respect to a family of candidate explanations is likely to be the true on Lipton On this approach, it is in virtue of their successful explanation of the empirical evidence that theoretical claims are supported.
Bayesian approaches to scientific confirmation have garnered significant attention and are now widespread in philosophy of science. Bayesians hold that the evidential bearing of empirical evidence on a theoretical claim is to be understood in terms of likelihood or conditional probability. For example, whether empirical evidence argues for a theoretical claim might be thought to depend upon whether it is more probable and if so how much more probable than its denial conditional on a description of the evidence together with background beliefs, including theoretical commitments.
How to justify the choice of these prior probability assignments is one of the most notorious points of contention arising for Bayesians. If one makes the assignment of priors a subjective matter decided by epistemic agents, then it is not clear that they can be justified. This is a fact pertinent to chemical elements, but not to samples of material like wax ibid. Still, there are those who may be skeptical about the very possibility of confirmation or of successful induction.
Insofar as the bearing of evidence on theory is never totally decisive, insofar there is no single trusty universal schema that captures empirical support, perhaps the relationship between empirical evidence and scientific theory is not really about support after all. Giving up on empirical support would not automatically mean abandoning any epistemic value for empirical evidence. Rather than confirm theory, the epistemic role of evidence could be to constrain, for example by furnishing phenomena for theory to systematize or to adequately model.
How well a theory performs any of these tasks need not depend upon the truth or accuracy of its basic principles. Theorists are to use those assumptions as calculating tools without committing themselves to their truth. In particular, the assumption that the planets revolve around the sun must be evaluated solely in terms of how useful it is in calculating their observable relative positions to a satisfactory approximation.
For Duhem a physical theory. Investigators produce them by performing measuring and other experimental operations and assigning symbols to perceptible results according to pre-established operational definitions Duhem , For Duhem, the main function of a physical theory is to help us store and retrieve information about observables we would not otherwise be able to keep track of.
If that is what a theory is supposed to accomplish, its main virtue should be intellectual economy. Theorists are to replace reports of individual observations with experimental laws and devise higher level laws the fewer, the better from which experimental laws the more, the better can be mathematically derived Duhem , 21ff.
Let EL be one or more experimental laws that perform acceptably well on such tests. Higher level laws can then be evaluated on the basis of how well they integrate EL into the rest of the theory. Other data may need to be accommodated by replacing or modifying one or more experimental laws or adding new ones. If the required additions, modifications or replacements deliver experimental laws that are harder to integrate, the data count against the theory. If the required changes are conducive to improved systematization the data count in favor of it.
Thus, for van Fraassen, we continually check the empirical adequacy of our theories by seeing if they have the structural resources to accommodate new observations. The primary appeal of dealing in empirical adequacy rather than confirmation is its appropriate epistemic humility.
Instead of claiming that confirming evidence justifies belief or boosted confidence that a theory is true, one is restricted to saying that the theory continues to be consistent with the evidence as far as we can tell so far. However, if the epistemic utility of empirical results in appraising the status of theories is just to judge their empirical adequacy, then it may be difficult to account for the difference between adequate but unrealistic theories, and those equally adequate theories that ought to be taken seriously as representations.
Appealing to extra-empirical virtues like parsimony may be a way out, but one that will not appeal to philosophers skeptical of the connection thereby supposed between such virtues and representational fidelity.
On an earlier way of thinking, observation was to serve as the unmediated foundation of science—direct access to the facts upon which the edifice of scientific knowledge could be built. When conflict arose between factions with different ideological commitments, observations could furnish the material for neutral arbitration and settle the matter objectively, in virtue of being independent of non-empirical commitments.
According to this view, scientists working in different paradigms could at least appeal to the same observations, and propagandists could be held accountable to the publicly accessible content of theory and value-free observations.
Despite their different theories, Priestley and Lavoisier could find shared ground in the observations. Anti-Semites would be compelled to admit the success of a theory authored by a Jewish physicist, in virtue of the unassailable facts revealed by observation.
The strict contrast between theory and observation in science is more fruitfully supplanted by inquiry into the relationship between theorizing and empirical results. Contemporary philosophers of science tend to embrace the theory ladenness of empirical results. Instead of seeing the integration of the theoretical and the empirical as an impediment to furthering scientific knowledge, they see it as necessary.
That is, it is impossible to put empirical results to use without recruiting some theoretical resources. In order to use an empirical result to constrain or test a theory it has to be processed into a form that can be compared to that theory. To get stellar spectrograms to bear on Newtonian or relativistic cosmology, they need to be processed—into galactic rotation curves, say. The spectrograms by themselves are just artifacts, pieces of paper. Scientists need theoretical resources in order to even identify that such artifacts bear information relevant for their purposes, and certainly to put them to any epistemic use in assessing theories.
This outlook does not render contemporary philosophers of science all constructivists, however. Theory mediates the connection between the target of inquiry and the scientific worldview, it does not sever it. Theory can be deployed in experiment design, data processing, and presentation of results in unproductive ways, for instance, in determining whether the results will speak for or against a particular theory regardless of what the world is like.
Critical appraisal of the roles of theory is thus important for genuine learning about nature through science. Indeed, it seems that extra-empirical values can sometimes assist such critical appraisal.
Instead of viewing observation as the theory-free and for that reason furnishing the content with which to appraise theories, we might attend to the choices and mistakes that can be made in collecting and generating empirical results with the help of theoretical resources, and endeavor to make choices conducive to learning and correct mistakes as we discover them.
Recognizing the involvement of theory and values in the constitution and generation of empirical results does not undermine the special epistemic value of empirical science in contrast to propaganda and pseudoscience. In cases where the influence of cultural, political, and religious values hinder scientific inquiry, it is often the case that they do so by limiting or determining the nature of the empirical results.
Yet, by working to make the assumptions that shape results explicit we can examine their suitability for our purposes and attempt to restructure inquiry as necessary.
When disagreements arise, scientists can attempt to settle them by appealing to the causal connections between the research target and the empirical data. The tribunal of experience speaks through empirical results, but it only does so through via careful fashioning with theoretical resources.
Introduction 2. Observation and data 2. Theory and value ladenness 3. The epistemic value of empirical evidence 4. Introduction Philosophers of science have traditionally recognized a special role for observations in the epistemology of science. Hempel , This view is motivated by the assumption that the epistemic value of an observation report depends upon its truth or accuracy, and that with regard to perception, the only thing observers can know with certainty to be true or accurate is how things appear to them.
Theory and value ladenness Empirical results are laden with values and theoretical commitments. His experiment was such that he might well have obtained results showing that the charge of the electron was not quantized or that there was no single stable value for this quantity.
We need to ensure that value judgements do not operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion. This is our fundamental criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of values in science. The epistemic value of empirical evidence One of the important applications of empirical evidence is its use in assessing the epistemic status of scientific theories.
For Duhem a physical theory … is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim to represent as simply and completely, and exactly as possible, a set of experimental laws.
Conclusion On an earlier way of thinking, observation was to serve as the unmediated foundation of science—direct access to the facts upon which the edifice of scientific knowledge could be built.
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