NATURAL SCIENCE

Starter Activity
Who is this and what is he
perhaps most well known for?
 The Rumsfeld Paradigm

“As we know, there are known known's.

There are things we know. We also know
there are known unknowns. That is to say
there are some things we know we don’t
know. But there are also unknown
unknowns, the ones we don’t know we
don’t know.”
 Your Current TOK Perspectives
Things you already know ie your ‘known
known’s’

Things you know you don’t know ie your

‘known unknowns’

Bonus prize to anyone who can list their

‘unknown unknowns’!
 Questions to consider:

What is the definition of or the nature of science?

How do we gain knowledge in science?
What is the role of creativity in science?
Is scientific knowledge progressive? How does the
social context of scientific work affect the
methods and findings of science?
What values and assumptions about knowledge
underpin science?
 ‘NORMAL SCIENCE’

Look at the beginning of any science text book and

you will find an explanation of the “scientific
method”- a way of doing science that was formalized
by Francis Bacon in the 17th. Century

What is the scientific method?

1. Observe something in the natural world; gather empirical data
2. Pose a question then make a prediction based on these observations:
Research question, hypothesis

3. Test your hypothesis with an experiment; make it a fair test by

controlling variables
4. Analyze the data and make a conclusion

5. Decide if your hypothesis was supported or not

6. If yes, yeah!!, you are on your way to a theory or more likely, in
the case of much of what you and scientists do, you have added
strength to a pre-existing theory
7. If your data doesn’t support the hypothesis….do you
throw out the hypothesis and come up with another one to
test? Probably not…..why?
Two philosophers of science: Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper have
some answers, which takes on an interesting journey into the worlds
of science and epistemology

Def: epistemology: The study or a theory of the nature and grounds

of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Kuhn says that a scientific community works within a

certain ‘paradigm’.
A paradigm, according to Kuhn is a collection of shared
beliefs, assumptions, laws, theories and methodologies,
which scientists in a particular discipline accept as the way
science is done .
A paradigm transforms a group into a profession
But scientists may become unable to see
outside of this paradigm- and this may result
in ignoring important data- such as data that
doesn’t fit the paradigm.

“ a striking feature of doing research

is that the aim is to discover what is
known in advance” (Kuhn)
Kuhn says that scientists tend to discard and ignore anomalous
results and therefore just perpetuate the status-quo.

Normal science:
…“ is an attempt to force nature into the pre-formed and
relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies”

Normal science:
… “does not aim at novelties of
fact or theory and, when successful, finds none”
What happens to you in science class, when you
come across anomalous data?
So, if we only see what we expect to see
how does science ever progress?
What happens to scientist who put forward
new ideas that go against the paradigm?

Galileo

McClintock

Heisenberg
 McClintock’s discovery of genetic transposition
occurred between the 1920’s and 1950’s, but her
radical ideas were not well received by the scientific
community .

Her research was ridiculed, she stopped publishing

her results and continued her research in isolation.

In the 1960s some other biologist ’rediscovered’ her

work. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 (the
first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize)
Quote from her NP acceptance speech:
“ I have been asked, notably by young
investigators, just how I felt during the long
period when my work was ignored,
dismissed, or aroused frustration. At first, I
must admit, I was surprised and then
puzzled, as I thought the evidence and the
logic sustaining my interpretation of it, were
sufficiently revealing. It soon became clear,
however, that tacit assumptions - the
substance of dogma - served as a barrier to
effective communication…
…In the interim I was not invited to give
lectures or seminars, except on rare
occasions, or to serve on committees or
panels, or to perform other scientists' duties.
Instead of causing personal difficulties, this
long interval proved to be a delight. It
allowed complete freedom to continue
investigations without interruption, and for
the pure joy they provided.”
Emotion and science, is there a
masculine and feminine way of
doing science?
After Barbara McClintock, the
great maize geneticist, received
the Nobel Prize for her work,
Marcus Rhodes, a colleague,
asked her how it was that she
was able to see in a cell what
others had heretofore not seen.
She replied that when she
looked into the microscope she
was able to forget herself
completely and thereby get "a
feel for the organism."
Galileo, McClintock, Heisenberg are examples of scientists
whose work caused paradigm shifts. So, in Kuhn’s view,
science does not really progress in a methodical, linear way;
but has repeated upheavals and revolutions that change the
whole community in very essential ways.
For another look at a very basic way we do
science we will look at another philosopher of
science: Karl Popper.
INDUCTIVE LOGIC
I assume that my when my alarm goes off at 6:30 am, it
is 6:30 am, because its been correct all year.
But, what is the problem with making this assumption?
Gobbler, the turkey was fed every day of his life by
the farmer. When he saw the farmer on
Thanksgiving morning, he got excited, looking
forward to his corn.
Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as expected for
Gobbler that morning...
Karl Popper, saw this ‘problem of induction’ as a
major flaw in how we do science.
So, what are scientist to do? How do
they make conclusions if inductive
logic is so unsatisfactory?
 Karl Popper quotes:
* It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for
nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.

* Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it

forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory
forbids, the better it is.

• A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event

is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory
(as people often think) but a vice.
In this way (refuting theories) science progresses,
constantly changing theories to fit new
observations. Acknowledging that therefore all
knowledge in science is provisional.

“No amount of experimentation can ever

prove me right. A single experiment can
prove me wrong.”
-Albert Einstein
An example:
Law: Substances boil at a constant temperature
Example:Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade

But what about

In a closed
At high
vessel
altitude
So, you can see how being ‘wrong’ generates much more
knowledge than being ‘right’. Looking for evidence to
falsify the hypothesis gave us new information about the
relationship between pressure and temperature.

“science becomes an exhilarating adventure where imagination

and vision lead to conceptual developments transcending in
generality and range the experimental evidence.”
-Popper
But don’t we need some theories to ground
us in science?
If all knowledge is provisional, how can
we apply our theories, which is, after all
one important function of science.

How does Popper resolve this?

“All we can do is to search for the falsity content of our
best theory. We do so by trying to refute our theory; that is,
by trying to test it severely in the light of all our objective
knowledge and all our ingenuity. It is, of course, always
possible that the theory may be false even if it passes all
these tests; that is allowed for by our search for
verisimilitude (truthlikeness). But if it passes all these tests
then we may have good reason to conjecture that our
theory, which (we know) has a greater truth content than
its predecessor, may have no greater falsity content. And if
we fail to refute the new theory, especially in fields in
which its predecessor has been refuted, then we can claim
this as one of the objective reasons for the conjecture that
the new theory is a better approximation to truth than the
old theory.” (Popper, 1975)

Can you paraphrase?

All we can do is test our theory and try to falsify it.

Even if we keep testing it and can’t falsify it , it doesn’t

mean its right, but that’s ok, because we’re looking for the
truth.

We CAN say that if a new theory passes our test at least it

is less false than the one that came before it.

So the new theory is closer to the truth than the old one.
Hmmmmmmm …