The Aim of Science

[Fifty]

What do you think is the epistemic aim of science?

By epistemic aim, I mean what sorts of knowledge do we want to gain through science, absent practical (e.g. technology-creation) concerns? Clearly it isn't just knowledge as such, because there is a huge variety of trivial truths that we don't give a flying poop about knowing. So what is the epistemic aim of science, and why do you think that?

Spoiler What's to come! :

After you guys post your ideas and vote n' stuff for awhile, I'm gonna try to show that the first four options are poopity

 

[LightFang]

To identify the laws of nature.

All science is is essentially "I pointed my telescope at X and saw Y" or "I put A in B and C happened". It's to see how things work.

So I put down "to identify the laws of nature".

 

[Tee Kay]

The aim of science is to discover the truth behind what is unknown. Simple really.

 

[Fifty]

The aim of science is to discover the truth behind what is unknown. Simple really.

So why aint science like investigating the distance in millimeters between every piece of dust on my desk? It's a thing that is unknown, yet we seem utterly disinterested in it.

 

[Mark1031]

the aim of science is to get grant $$ and recognition and awards from your peers. But of the choices listed I voted "to discover the fundamental causal processes at work in nature"

 

[Tee Kay]

So why aint science like investigating the distance in millimeters between every piece of dust on my desk? It's a thing that is unknown, yet we seem utterly disinterested in it.

No one's interested in that subject enough to do that yet, maybe you could start.

 

[Fifty]

No one's interested in that subject enough to do that yet, maybe you could start.

So it isn't just "discover the truth behind what is unknown" but "discover the truth behind what is unknown and of interest to us". That's a big difference!

 

[Babbler]

The aim of science is to discover how the universe operated, and how it came to be in its present form.

 

[gallego]

It doesn't matter. You can't prove knowledge anyway. But we keep going just because it's there to discover, and at least hypothetically, it holds promise of answering our curiosity to some degree. If we wake up tomorrow and find that the last several thousand years of knowledge are all gone to waste because our scientific base principles no longer hold and everything is backward, then we'll be pretty confused. But until then, we have to just keep chipping away.

Science is a like a path in a dark forest when you can only see a few meters ahead. Something in our nature tells us to keep going, so we walk down it and keep doing so because we aren't content with just sitting still. We don't know where it goes, but we keep going in lack of a better alternative.

 

[amadeus]

Improve our (generally) material well-being?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Science has no aim. It takes direction from those who are currently engaged in using its practices and those allocating the dollars for research. It amasses observable details and tries to build broader and broader generalities from those details. Most scientists live in the details and work to build only modest conclusions.

 

[Verbose]

Depends entirely on who is talking about it.
(Meaning I disagree with Bird above to some extent; science has lots of meanings, just not some kind of immutable essential one.)

Scientists themselves tend to have a fairly consistent ideological view of what science "does" and "means" in the vicinity of alt. 1-4, and then they go and do a lot of things never covered by that ideology. It tends to be bad for your career as a scientist to take that ideology of how it is supposed to work at face value.

And at the same time scientific investigations are also artifacts of the systems funding it, and those administrating these may (or may not) have a different view of the point of it.

In fact, is there such a thing as a stable entity called "science"? I think I'd have to go with it as a multiplicity — that's also the point of things like the German "Wissenschaft" (Sv. "vetenskap"), neither of which entirely conform with the English/French "science" anyway.

 

[Stylesjl]

Science has no real purpose. people just acquire objective knowledge through observation and then determining rules and laws of such behaviour, then particular people may use this understanding for some purpose such as building a car engine, determining the age of the universe, or allowing human longevity.

 

[Zarn]

Science is used to understand the physical.

 

[gallego]

What do you think is the epistemic aim of science?

By epistemic aim, I mean what sorts of knowledge do we want to gain through science, absent practical (e.g. technology-creation) concerns?

Another thing; I think there's a distinction between science and philosophy in there. If you call philosophy by its true name, I think people will be a lot less concerned about it.

 

[LightFang]

What's philosophy's true name then?

 

[Bad Player]

The aim of science is to discover the truth behind what is unknown. Simple really.

I'd agree with this.

Psychological studies are science and they aren't about determining the laws of nature, rather they look for truth in how humans of a particular culture etc act. This obviously can change given time and cultural changes.

 

[Zarn]

I'd agree with this.

Psychological studies are science and they aren't about determining the laws of nature, rather they look for truth in how humans of a particular culture etc act. This obviously can change given time and cultural changes.

Science cannot explain the metaphysical or even if there is a metaphysical.

 

[Dr Tiny]

Personally, I feel that my research (and science as a whole) works towards fulfilling the first 5 options in the poll.

 

[brennan]

None of the options really describe what science does, I would say something along the lines of:

'Investigating nature to build a theoretical model of how it works'.