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posted by [identity profile] didiusjulianus.livejournal.com at 04:57pm on 19/08/2009
I think it is.
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posted by [identity profile] mister-jack.livejournal.com at 05:05pm on 19/08/2009
What, in your view, makes a science a science, then?
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posted by [identity profile] randomchris.livejournal.com at 09:36pm on 19/08/2009
When you ask a question, can you be fairly sure that there's an answer to it, and there's a way of finding that and proving it to be right? Then it's a science.
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posted by [identity profile] angoel.livejournal.com at 11:09pm on 19/08/2009
I'm not at all convinced that that's a good definition, because it's equally true for easy questions within science and humanities (what is gravity and what is a noun) and equally false for the hard questions (why does time flow in only one direction, and who *really* wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare).
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simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] simont at 08:30am on 20/08/2009
On the other hand, maths has a fundamentally different character from most sciences, in that it's almost exclusively deductive where nearly anything else that gets labelled 'science' is inductive. So it's understandable that people should see it as not obviously the same thing; it all depends on what you think is the most important aspect.

I think one just has to accept that maths is a bit weird, and that if one is trying to categorise academic disciplines then one has to either make a category specially for maths, specify where maths should be filed, or resign oneself to it being filed all over the place :-)
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posted by [identity profile] keirf.livejournal.com at 12:40pm on 20/08/2009
That's what makes it so great!
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posted by [identity profile] arnhem.livejournal.com at 12:49pm on 20/08/2009
I think that describes maths, not science.

Science is about refining and testing and disproving models of the world. Almost no science is about proving anything to be _right_ ; the best you can ever say is "we haven't yet found any counter-evidence to our model".

I think that much of the media think science is as you describe, and this is one of the big reasons why the media so often mis-represent science so badly. [ The whole "oh look, they've changed their minds about what foods are good and bad for you" style of reporting, for instance ].
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