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In Reply to: RE: Anyone who says, "empirical evidence without theory is not science" talks science not practices it. posted by Norm on July 08, 2008 at 16:52:54
To borrow again from your field via Giovanni Sartori.
That's a common theme in science and many great minds have espoused on the failings of science when it goes from theory to nothing more than the collection of facts without applied reasoning (empirical) or as Rutherford put it "stamp collecting."
Your post is interesting and implies to me that a couple of things are at play, the first being that you missed some things in my previous post and the second that you are not aware of what is currently happening in science and are stuck with the older approach to science. In many fields, the process of gathering empirical evidence and how it is applied in theory is undergoing a gradual shift to implementing Karl Popper's refinement of the scientific method. Granted, that's something that's only really started picking up steam in the last couple of decades, so you may not be abreast of it.
To borrow a couple summaries of Popper's new scientific method from this Stanford page on him...
"…experience cannot determine theory (i.e., we do not argue or infer from observation to theory), it rather delimits it: it shows which theories are false, not which theories are true. Moreover, Popper also rejects the empiricist doctrine that empirical observations are, or can be, infallible, in view of the fact that they are themselves theory-laden"
"…Scientific theories, for him(Popper), are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical — we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining, unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to science — for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one, in the sense of possessing the highest level of explanatory force and predictive power"
Interestingly, this is kind of all that's old is new again when one looks back to the history of the development of the scientific method. Take, for instance, this quote that stands against being too "empirical" from d'Alembert, Condorcet and Bossut's Nouvelles experiences sur la resistance des fluides:
"To ask questions of nature by doing experiments is a very delicate matter. In vain do you assemble the facts if these have no relation to each other; if they appear in an equivocal form; if, when they are produced by difference causes, you are unable to assign and distinguish the particular effects of these causes with a certain precision...Do not heed the limited experimenter, the one who lacks principles; guided by an unreasoning method, he often shows us the same fact in different guises -- of necessity, and perhaps without recognising this himself; or he gathers at random several facts whose differences he is unable to explain. A science without reasoning does not exist or what comes to the same thing, a science without theory does not exist."
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