Loop holes in science? research guiding.?

Question

Just looking for either phenomena or flaws in science to research. Thanks.

Answer 1

Querious has some points which he apparently found written somewhere.    His comment on global warming is just his opinion, and there are many scientists who have much more education and experience than he probably does, do indeed think that man made activity is a factor at least in global warming, and should be considered when thinking about the future of mankind and the life on earth.

Answer 2

We can expect the enterprise of science to suffer from human foibles as any other human enterprise does to some degree. However science has some natural resistance to error, that almost no other human enterprise I can think of has. A resilience and dependability that might be compared only with the market.

One major weakness of science, or rather a weakness of trying to depend exclusively on science for one's understanding, is that science is a slow process which can rule out errors much more quickly than it can discover unexpected phenomena or generate new knowledge.

One of the problems that I believe plagues science greatly in today's world is the problem of financial dependence and its effects on research. That advertisements in magazines for, say, cigarettes for example, affects the objectivity of reporting about cigarettes in that magazine is well known. People also know to be skeptical of a scientific study funded by a cigarette company, to determine whether cigarettes cause cancer. Its well-known that cases like that are almost totally worthless because the study will tend to support the goals of the institution that pays for it. Yet few people realize any danger in the fact that a majority of research grants today come from a single institution, the government.

Science is also very difficult to define. Most definitions of science, since at least the beginning of the 20th century, have tended to describe physics much more accurately than biology or economics, which rely on different methods and are rarely helped by trying to burrow methods from physics.

Science is often defined as a practice that relies on the scientific method, but there is no method that is used in all the fields of study that are usually called science.

Science also has a number of philosophical problems. Though, in my view, the gaps in the philosophy of science are small, some of them are interesting. For instance, most modern scientists claim that they do not consider theories provable, but only disprovable, and that the purpose of research is not to prove a theory, but to gather evidence in favor of it. But while saying this they still act as if a well tested theory has been proved, and move on to testing other theories, using it as a base.

However, knowing all of this, I still believe that science is epistemically special, and a very noble, valuable and valid path to knowledge as compared with virtually any other method of finding truth known to man. To someone who is unaware of these problems learns of them for the first time I can imagine that they would be dismayed by the problems with science, which many imagine to be perfect, if not merely far beyond all other ways of knowing, but the test of science is not I think, in how great its faults are, but how they compare to the faults in any other approach to understanding.

Many claims to knowledge are clumsy, and slippery, and built on mistakes and guesses and horrible fallacies. Science stands up well next to them, even if it needs improvement.

That isn't to say I believe everything that science tells us these days. I think that evolution is true, but I think they have a lot of work to do before they satisfactorily understand large-scale cosmology or quantum physics. And I also think that the idea that humans are causing global warming will soon be seen as a mistake, so take that for what it's worth.