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Date Posted: 19:48:06 05/03/07 Thu
Author: Matheus Corrêa
Subject: Task Two

The Scientific Method

In my first essay, I briefly discussed the merits and failings of classical cognitvism. For a number of reasons, I deemed its treatment of human cognition unscientific. But what exactly does this mean, and why is it important to keep such studies strictly scientific? To have these questions answered, there is nothing better than to learn what the scientific method actually is.

In order to understand any kind of phenomenon, scientists first observe it and then try to formulate an hypothesis to explain it. This step is common to everything human beings claim to know. Myths, for example, came to be exactly that way--upon observing a violent thunderstorm, or the movement of the stars, humans attempted to make sense of their experiences by creating deities and supernatural forces. This, however, is not enough for a piece of knowledge to be considered scientific; in fact, I would go as far as saying that it is not enough for it to be considered knowledge at all.

The second step consists of using the hypothesis to make predictions about the future. This is the most crucial aspect of the method, because what sets science apart is not its explanations, but its predictions. When you see a glass falling and breaking, for example, you instinctively connect the first event (the fall) to the second event (the breaking). But if I claimed that glasses naturally break by themselves every now and then, there would be no way to choose between our competing hypotheses if they remained strictly explanatory. To decide who is right, we would have to use each hypothesis to predict a future event. If the fall of glasses repeatedly caused them to break, while any other glasses failed to break naturally, we could say that the first hypothesis is correct.

The last step of the scientific method is to have a considerable amount of tests performed by independent scientists. This is important not only because we cannot simply trust an individual, but because we need to make sure that all experiments are properly performed. In order to have a successful experiment, all important variables should be taken into account, and any scientist can end up overlooking some of them. Thus peer-review is crucial to uncover eventual mistakes.

Having all this in mind, we can now see why unscientific approaches should be discarded. Some accuse science of trying to hold the monopoly of all human knowledge, but these accusations are almost always made by those who don't grasp why science operates this way. The truth is that if a piece of knowledge is not shown to have any predictive power at all, we have absolutely no reasons to consider it more true than imaginary beings such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Thus it follows that we can only truly make sense of the world by adopting a scientific point of view.

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