science

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/back-to-reality/
"Back to Reality"
December 2, 2008
by Olivia Judson
The New York Times

"In many respects science has been the dominant force — for good and ill — that has transformed human lives over the past two centuries.

In schools, science is often taught as a body of knowledge — a set of facts and equations. But all that is just a consequence of scientific activity.

Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible. It is an attitude, a stance towards measuring, evaluating and describing the world that is based on skepticism, investigation and evidence. The hallmark is curiosity; the aim, to see the world as it is."

I am these days thinking that there is a real connection between logical positivism, their project of getting a grip on the nature of science, and what Cora Diamond calls "the realistic spirit," and what I tend to put under the heading "to see the world aright." The thought is, somehow, that it is science that provides us with the clearest view of the world.

On a related note, I suspect that many problems that we have can, in the end, be solved by science, and little else. That is, the problem is that we just don't know how to do something, and once science figures it out - things will change. Or at least they can. That is, I remarked elsewhere, "Sure it's true. But is it necessarily true?" And science is what, as far as we are concerned, often shifts the boundaries of what is necessarily true. And so if we want to change something, we had best figure out how. (how to change people themselves).