SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE

INTRODUCTION

 Science can be defined as the study or knowledge of the physical and natural world based on observation and experimentation. There are different sciences that can be mainly put into two categories. They are natural sciences and social sciences. Natural sciences include chemistry, physics,zoology, biology, etc. Social sciences include sociology, political science, demography, etc. All sciences provide a scientific understanding of the natural or the social world.

 

A. METHOD OF SCIENCE

 The method of science (scientific method) is the process by which science is carried out. As in other areas of inquiry, science (through the scientific method) can build on previous knowledge and develop a more sophisticated understanding of its topics of study over time.

Method of science involves the following

1. Asking a question,
2. Doing background research
3. Construct a hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis with an experience
5. Procedure working?
6. Analysis data and drawing of conclusion

The outline process of science method can be illustrated in the form of flow chart as shown below:

Elements of the scientific method

There are different ways of outlining the basic method used for scientific inquiry. The scientific communityand philosophers of science generally agree on the following classification of method components. These methodological elements and organization of procedures tend to be more characteristic of natural sciences than social sciences. Nonetheless, the cycle of formulating hypotheses, testing and analyzing the results, and formulating new hypotheses, will resemble the cycle described below.

Four essential elements of the scientific method are iterations,^[57][58] recursions, inter leavings, or orderings of the following:

• Characterizations (observations,^[60] definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)
• Hypotheses^[61][62] (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)
• Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory)
• Experiments

B. AIMS OF THE SCIENCE

 Science as a collective institution aims to produce more and more accurate natural explanations of how the natural world works, what its components are, and how the world got to be the way it is now.

C. THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE

One of the most important things science gave us was security – we figured out how to take care of our physiological needs, as well as our physical needs. Having something to eat the next day, a place to be safe and treatment for a sickness became normal aspects of our lives, and with these basic needs fulfilled, we were free to concentrate on learning even more. We made the most out of science by initially trying to understand how things worked, and then making them work to our advantage; the result is that, besides offering us what we needed, science allowed us to create what we wanted.

 

Even more important than security is self-awareness. Science allowed us to understand how things work, but also how to make things happen. Social sciences made us understand that, if we want to survive, we need to work together in an organized matter. This is what led to the apparition of the economic system, the political systems and the education system.

Science is introduced in our lives at an early stage, through our education. We learn a basic set of skills that we expand with specific knowledge in a certain direction at a later stage, but we never really appreciate just how important science is in all this equation.

D. Compare Science and COMMON SENSE

 Common sense and science are two words that are often confused when it comes to their meanings when strictly speaking, there is a difference between the two words. Common sense is our usual understanding of practical issues. The word common sense is used in the sense of ‘natural instinct.’ On the other hand, science is the study or knowledge of the physical and natural world based on observation and experimentation. The word science is used in the sense of a ‘kind of knowledge.’ Common sense is our knowledge of day to day life. Science goes a step beyond and provides scientific explanations for realities in life and those that we take for granted.

 

Common sense includes our knowledge of day to day realities. It is how a lay person comprehends the world around him. Common sense provides practical solutions to daily matters. As human beings, through the process of development, we all acquire common sense. It is this knowledge that allows us to behave properly in the society. Simply common sense includes things that we take for granted. While Science can be defined as the study or knowledge of the physical and natural world based on observation and experimentation.

 

Differences between science and commonsense

 1.     The goals of science and commonsense are different. Commonsense is mainly concerned with immediate action in context; science is mainly concerned with achieving some understanding which – to some extent – is independent of persons and context, and in this interest may eschew the need for guiding immediate action.

 2.     Science has developed an extensive tool-kit of theoretical models, investigated in great detail, so that its imaginative resources are very finely structured and elaborated. While Commonsense relies more on the broad brush of basic dimensions of how things can possibly be. Its rationality boils down to what makes sense.

 3.     Science relies more on extensive collaborative and competitive work towards unarguable agreement. Commonsense is certainly collaborative (even collusive), but when differences arise, agreements to differ are common. In the commonsense world, persons think as they do; in the scientific world, knowledge is what it currently is.

Similarities Between Science And Commonsense

 1.     Both science and commonsense rely on fundamentally concrete modes of thought.

 2.     Reasoning is done with imagined entities and events. That the imagined entities of science are different from those of commonsense is not now the point; the point is that they are used in thinking in fundamentally the same kind of way. Explanations, both in science and in commonsense accounts of physical reality, are stories about what entities in a world would have done in order to bring about what is to be explained.

 3.     Both science and commonsense stop explaining at the level of what is (for the time being) made to seem obvious. Explaining stops when we understand events as working out according to the currently imagined and understood nature of how things are.

 4.     Both science and commonsense share, or at least so I suppose, the same common ontology of space, time, object, and action (that is, the same basic dimensions of thought). But they use them differently, and attribute entities and events differently to them.

REFERENCES

 http://idea.ucr.edu/documents/flash/scientific_method/story.htm

 Rules for the study of natural philosophy“, Newton transl 1999, pp. 794–6, after Book 3, The System of the World.

 From the Oxford English Dictionary definition for “scientific”.

 Peirce (1908), “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, Hibbert Journal v. 7, pp. 90–112.

 Gauch, Hugh G. (2003). Scientific Method in Practice (Reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 9780521017084. Retrieved 2015-01-26.