nauka

Indeed, many people accept the ideas of science because they have been told that these ideas are true rather than because they understand them.

Aristotle also clearly recognized one of the key features of early science: it offered no reward other than intellectual gratification. 'Thus, since men turned to philosophy in order to escape from a state of ignorance, their aim was evidently knowledge, rather than any sort of practical gain. The evidence of history confirms this: for, when the necessities of life were mostly provided, men turned their minds to this study as a leisure-time reaction.'

The very natures of scientific and technological thinking are dissimilar. Many aspects of technology are visual and non-verbal, which is quite unlike scientific thinking. It is not that scientists do not visualize structures, concepts and mechanisms, but exposition is fundamental to science and the images must be translated into language and symbols, particularly mathematics. Unencumbered by verbalized theories, the designers of technology bring together, in their minds, different elements in new combinations. In contrast to science, technological knowledge from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century was carried in books which were dominated by illustrations - the information was largely carried in pictorial form. Many of the books carried numerous illustrations of mechanical linkages, assemblies of gears and cams, and machines themselves, such as pumps. Curiously, there were claims that all these mechanical arts rested on the firm foundation of mathematics, but quite the contrary was true: there is no evidence for the use of either geometry or arithmetic in the design of the machines. It seems that it was true even then, as now, that claims that designs were based on science gave them greater respectability. Visual thinking also dominated industrial design. Science offered no guidance to the early designers of motorcycles, for example - it could not teU them where to put the engine, battery and fuel tank in relation to one another.

The development of Western science has been based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

It is true that the Chinese did not possess geometry, but perhaps their philosophy and the absence of capitalism were also important.

A case can be made for the importance of Christianity in fostering, in the West, the rationality, in the sense of logical arguments and reasoned discussion, that was necessary for science, and in also providing a system in which there was the possibility - even the conviction - that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity.

While emphasizing the contribution of Christian society to science, the contributions of Islam must also be recognized. Islamic scholars also continued the Greek tradition, and it may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue. It could, of course, not have been Christianity alone that was responsible for the flowering of science in the West in the sixteenth century.

The view presented here is that only those societies influenced by the Greeks developed science.

There was no inevitability that science should have arisen in Greece, or that it should have been sustained by the intellectual climate of Christianity and capitalism.

As the mathematician David Hilbert once expressed it, the importance of a scientific work can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes it superfluous to read.

Kuhn has further claimed that paradigm-changes come about through revolutions in science which result from the increasing number of strains put upon the existing paradigm. These strains arise because of the difficulties that are being experienced with the ideas constrained by the current paradigm. Since rival paradigms are regarded by Kuhn as being incommensurable, and so cannot be compared, there is thus no rational basis for the change from one to another: rather, one has to explain the revolutions in terms of the social structure of the scientific community. That is, there is a social process by which the community is persuaded to adopt the new paradigm, since, as we have seen, scientists do not like to give up their hard-won ideas. One may recall Planck's remark that some scientists never do this and the new ideas become established because their opponents die. This may be rather a cynical view. Is it not much more likely that the community will adopt the new view - however painful, like Wegener's ideas about continental drift - when new evidence shows that the new theory provides a more satisfactory explanation? Nevertheless, Kuhn is correct in emphasizing the importance of social process in biology, but in acknowledging this we approach the abyss of relativism.

Murray Gell-Mann, one of the founders of modern physics, says: "All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics invented more than fifty years ago. It has survived all tests. We suppose that it is exacdy correct. Nobody understands it but we all know to. use it and how to apply it to all problems: and so we have learned to live with the fact nobody can understand it".

The tradition of Averroes was taken to its logical conclusion by David Hume, who put it succinctly: 'Our most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason.' Opposing the traditional doctrine that science and religion were complementary, Hume maintained that they were mutually exclusive.

St Anselm: faith seeking understanding.

Even though most, if not all, of Aristotle's science was wrong - he can be thought of as the scientist of common sense - he established the basis of a system for explaining the world based on postulates and logical deduction. This was brilliantly exploited by Euclid and Archimedes. By contrast the Chinese, often thought of as scientists, were expert engineers but made negligible contributions to science. Their philosophies were essentially mystical, and it may have been rationality and a concept of laws governing nature that allowed science to develop in the West.

Physics is probably a good way of showing what is meant by science: it tries to provide an explanation of nature - the world we live in - at the most fundamental level. It aims to find explanations for an enormous variety of phenomena - the movement of all objects; the nature of light and sound, heat and electricity; the fundamental constitution of matter - in terms of as few principles as possible. Rigorous theories are constructed which explain observed phenomena, and these theories must be capable of being tested by both confirmation and attempts to falsify them. It is also an absolute requirement that theories must be capable of modification, or even abandonment, when evidence demands it. In this process, all the phenomena must be capable of observation by independent observers, for scientific knowledge is public knowledge.

Unlike science, everyday common-sense thinking is characterized by its naturalness. It involves complex mental processes of which we are usually quite unaware but which allow us to deal with the requirements of daily life. For most of everyday life it works extremely well, but for science it is quite unsatisfactory. It is quite different from scientific thinking, lacking the necessary rigour, consistency and objectivity. Most people regard their ideas about the world as being true without being aware of the grounds for a particular belief. This is quite unlike the self-aware and self-critical methodology of science. Common-sense thinking is also prone to lead to error, particularly when formal problems are posed and when the information available is limited. Indeed, common-sense thinking is not concerned with tackling formal problems or generating general solutions. The differences between common-sense thinking and scientific thinking can be illuminated in two ways: first by looking at the way in which children develop their thinking and then by looking at some aspects of adult thinking.

1. Twierdzenia teorii nie dotyczą obiektów konkretnych, lecz specyficznych obiektów teoretycznych.
   Na przykład geometria euklidesowa może konstruować twierdzenia o kątach czy odcinkach, termodynamika zaś – o temperaturze czy entropii jakiegoś układu; jednak w naturze nie istnieją kąty, odcinki, temperatury ani entropia.

2. Teoria ma strukturę ściśle dedukcyjną,
   tzn. jest złożona z niewielu oznajmień podstawowych (zwanych aksjomatami, postulatami bądź zasadami) o własnych charakterystycznych przedmiotach i z metody – jednolitej i powszechnie przyjętej, pozwalającej wyprowadzać z niej nieograniczoną liczbę wniosków. Innymi słowy, teoria dostarcza ogólnych metod rozwiązywania nieograniczonej liczby problemów. Problemy te, formułowane w obrębie struktury danej teorii, są w rzeczywistości „ćwiczeniami”, w tej mierze, w jakiej miedzy specjalistami panuje powszechna zgoda co do metod, których można użyć do ich rozwiązywania i do sprawdzenia poprawności rozwiązań. Metodami podstawowymi są dowodzenie i rachunek. W tym więc sensie zagwarantowana jest „prawda” twierdzeń naukowych.

3. Zastosowania do świata rzeczywistego oparte są na regułach odpowiedniości między przedmiotami [enti] teorii a obiektami konkretnymi.
   W odróżnieniu od twierdzeń zawartych w obrębie teorii, reguły odpowiedniości nie mają żadnej absolutnej gwarancji. Fundamentalną metodą sprawdzania prawomocności reguł odpowiedniości, tj. stosowalności teorii, jest eksperyment. Wszelako zakres prawomocności reguł odpowiedniości jest każdorazowo ograniczony.

Darwin said :
"Science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them."

Most biological "facts" and theories are only true under certain conditions and our knowledge is so incomplete that at best we can only reason on probabilities and possibilities.

Technika jest zbyt ważna, by czekać na rozwiązania nauki.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

Benoit Mandelbrot

1. tendencyjność publikacyjna (wydawanie głównie prac opisujących wyniki pozytywne),
2. słabość systemu peer review (oceny prac przez innych naukowców)
3. oraz rosnąca liczba badań, których nie udaje się powtórzyć.

Dobre omówienie tych kwestii można znaleźć pod adresem www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-self-correcting-alarming-degree-if-not-trouble [dostęp: 29 stycznia 2017].