Hello everybody. Today we will be talking about the introduction to scientific thinking.
So, what is science? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "A branch of study which is
concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts
systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general
laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its
own domain." So, that’s a pretty complicated way of saying that science is a way of collecting
knowledge in principle fashion. It's a way of bringing together the ways that humans
understand the world using consistent processes that are reliable. So, there are a variety
of ways that you might think about knowledge, what is supposedly that science is meant to
accumulate. You can think about it as being something that is acquired where it’s like
money and you can gather it together and store it up. You can also think about it as something
that’s built so that your understanding is assembled over time. There are a variety
of other metaphors that can be used for it as well. William Butler Yeats talked about
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." So, when you take
a scientific approach it’s trying to understand the world in a rigorous and data-based way,
and here I want to make a distinction between data and information. Data are measurements
of the world. Data is plural. The singular of data is a datum. Information on the other
hand is created when data are organized or presented in a specific way, and this is an
important distinction because data is (honk honk honk honk) not inherently understandable
by people necessarily, but information is something that is designed to be understood
by people. It’s a collection of data in a way that makes it possible for people to
understand it. So, the scientific method which is one key aspect of a great deal of science
involves the following steps. So, first you can start the hypothesis based on some experience
of the world or background research you’ve done trying to figure out how you think the
world is. The next step is you test that with an experiment. So, you create an experiment
that tries to isolate the aspect of your hypothesis in a way that allows you to asses them effectively.
The third step is you analysis the results. The final step is you either report your results
if you found something interesting, or you go back to step one and construct a new hypothesis
based on your findings. Ultimately the scientific method is only used by some sciences. There
are lots of others that focus more on observational or field-based studies. Things like astronomy
and archeology where you can’t effectively do an experiment using the scientific method
on the lifestyle of the Pteranodon for example. There are a variety of different limitations
on the scientific methods. So for example, the one that I just mentioned some phenomenon
may not be measurable. Something that happened in the past, the distant past, you can’t
measure it. Other experiments may not be ethical. You could potentially do a study about climate
change, but if it works out that what you’ve done has made the world worse that’s a problem.
Some other ones may be difficult because the data is obfuscated or unusable because of
some kind of interference. So for example, in archeology if some people have built a
road across the place that you are trying to look at that can change the data that you
might try to access. Ultimately though the value of science is that it allows for a principled
way of understanding the world which a really important aspect of how humans engage with
the world around us. A question though that often comes up is the relationship between
science and culture because on the one hand you could say science is part of culture,
that we have this culture that surrounds us, and one of the aspects of that culture is
the idea of science. On the other hand, you could think that culture is part of science,
that when you have a scientific approach you can study culture and learn about it using
scientific methods. Ultimately though it may be that both of those are significant, that
science is part culture, and culture is part of science, and together they form the world
around us. Another relationship is the relationship between science and technology. So, science
comes from a Latin word scio meaning to know, and technology comes from a Greek word techne
meaning craft. So, the difference between science and technology, science is about knowing
and technology is about making things. Ultimately though with both science and technology there
is an important role for human values that sets the course for what science and technology
should be exploring. What science should be learning about and what technology should
be making, and so that’s one thing that’s important to consider in the context of this
class is what are the human values that we are trying to enact in the world through our
science and technology efforts? This course takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding.
Many of you come from different disciplines. There are dozens of different majors represented
by the students in this class, and each of you brings to bear a different set of expertise
on the same set of problems. This leads to a particular challenge which is the relationship
among different disciplines because different disciplines have different languages they
use, different techniques that they use to explore the world, different standards of
what counts as good scholarship, and different assumptions that are shared within a particular
group, but not shared across groups. This leads on the one hand to some real challenges
when you have people from different disciplines who are trying to work together because different
people may think the same word means two different things. It also, though, leads to some really
interesting possibilities because exploring why one discipline uses one set of methodologies
and another discipline uses another one can allow for some real interesting explorations.
For example, when you apply the techniques from one discipline to the concept domains
of another discipline. Another point that is very relevant to a lot of the ways we will
be thinking about in this class is the idea of a taxonomy. So, a taxonomy is a classification
structure that is arranged in a hierarchy. So for example, if we were going to have a
taxonomy of the students in this class there are a variety of ways you could sort them.
You could start off by saying we’re going to take the different campuses and say the
first level will be distinguished between the nine campuses. Then within that we would
split students out by major. Then within that we would split them out by the year, and then
for example we would split them out alphabetically by their last name. But, there are some other
ways that make it trickier, that would be trickier to make a taxonomy. So for example,
sorting students by their actual graduation date would be difficult right now because
some of you may take an extra year, or some of you may finish quickly, some of you may
not finish at all, and so that would be something where it would be difficult to form a taxonomy
with that as one of the distinguishing criteria. Alternately, distinguishing students by for
example enthusiasm for this course is difficult because how do you measure it? It's difficult
to pin down whether student A's enthusiasm is greater or less than student B’s enthusiasm.
So, here we see a particular taxonomy. This is called the Thomson Reuters Business Classification,
and this is just a subset of it, but we can see that technology is broken down into technology
equipment versus software and I T services, and each one of those is broken down into
finer and finer detail. This is an example of a taxonomy being used out in the world.
Similarly, here is one from the Federal Aviation Administration which is describing a human
factors analysis and classifications system. That's what it is called. It says that unsafe
acts are broken down into on the one hand errors and on the other hand violations, and
errors are broken down into decision errors, and skill-based errors, and perceptual errors.
Violations are redline (routine) and exceptional. So, this is how the FAA thinks about all of
the different things that can go wrong in its domain. So, the reason I wanted to talk
a little bit about taxonomies here is to talk about the taxonomies that might be relevant
to sustainability issues that we are discussing in this class. So for example, the kinds of
issues that are relevant are pollution, and overpopulation, and the loss of biodiversity,
and the disruption of the global climate, and rising of sea levels, and the acidification
of our oceans, and poverty, and war, and animal suffering. These are all different topics
that relate to this domain, and you can imagine there are a variety of different ways to classify
these topics. You can distinguish ones that have to do with livings things versus not
so biotic versus abiotic. You could sort them by importance, but here you have a challenge
of whose decreeing which one is more important? You could have urgency, which one has the
most time pressure on it. You could do it by a time horizon, whether they are things
that happen over a narrow time horizon or a longer one. You could sort them geographically.
Some things happen in one place and some happen in another. Throughout this course we would
like to encourage you to consider the taxonomies that you implicitly use when you are thinking
about the world. All of you have implicit taxonomies about how you understand the world
around you, and I would like you to consider the impact that they have on your thinking
because the taxonomy issues very strongly cover the ways in which you understand the
world. We would also like you to think about ways that other people classify the world.
How other students in the class do it, how other people around the world, how we the
teaching staff do it, and think about whether or not they are compatible. Whether they are
compatible with each other, whether somebody else is compatible with yours, and when you
see one of these conflicts between the taxonomies people use try to think about which one is
better than the other one, and to consider potentially if you find one that is better
than the one that you think about, think about how you can change yours because ultimately
that is one of the important things that happens in education is you learn about other ways
of understanding the world and gradually you adopt them into the way that you understand
the world. So, thank you very much for your time. This ends the introduction to scientific
thinking lecture.