Scientific Explanation: Who Cares? Part 1

In this post, I will provide just one reason for thinking this topic is important. In a later post, I will provide another reason (one that connects it to religion). 

As we saw in the first two weeks of the semester, the demarcation problem turns out to be important for a variety of reasons. First, securing funding from government (and non-government agencies) often depends on whether the project is legitimate science. But what counts as legitimate science? Second, clear examples of science—like physics—seem to have a really good track record of predicting events and unifying seemingly very different phenomena. Thus, clear examples of science seem like really safe disciplines to trust. So, if I can show that my discipline is a lot like some really clear example of science (e.g. physics), then I can show that my discipline is trustworthy too. Third, science (the really clear examples at least) seems to have clear methods for resolving disputes. If scientist A disagrees with scientist B about something, then they know how, in principle, to settle the disagreement. So, science seems to provide us with an excellent methodology for reaching consensus. 

But, we also saw that the demarcation problem is difficult to solve. None of the attempts we looked at to solve the problem were highly satisfactory. One ended up refuting itself (Ayer’s), one ended up not being enough to separate science from non-science or pseudo-science (Popper’s), one ended up implying that settled science is not science at all (Lakatos), and one ended up implying that what counts as science is ultimately relative to place and time (Thagard). Yikes! 

Perhaps, we should approach the demarcation problem a bit differently. Maybe the key to distinguishing science from non-science is to discover what the goal of science is. For the theoretical sciences, it seems that the ultimate goal is an explanation of some sort. So, if we can figure out what a scientific explanation is, perhaps that will help us figure out what the difference is between science and non-science. 

So, one reason to care about scientific explanation is because understanding what a scientific explanation is can help us to understand what the ultimate goal of science is which can help us to distinguish science from non-science. 

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