Theory of Knowledge

"Science is built up of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house"

Henri Poincaré

Humans have always been interested in science, long before they even knew it was science. This is due to the fact that it is our tool for enhancing our living standards by means of new technology. We develop things that will simplify our lives as well as improve our health. With use of it we can even help evolution when developing new medicines and other medical equipment. What is most important for science to exist, I believe, is our curiosity. We simply want to know how things work and in order to do so, we need facts. Can facts themselves be science or are facts just as much science as a pile of bricks is a house? Henri Poincaré suggests that they are and I agree with him. To find out whether this is true or not, this essay will discuss what science is and what a fact is and what the difference between knowledge and a fact is.

Science seems hard to identify since there is no commonly accepted definition for it. What is science and what is not differs from who you happen to ask. Some people claim that only the natural sciences (physics, chemistry and biology) are true sciences whereas others include the social sciences such as psychology or even history. One might perhaps not figure out totally what subjects science really includes, but what seems more convenient is to define what makes science distinctive." It is commonly held that what makes science distinctive has nothing directly to do with the subject matter which is investigated, but that it is the method used to acquire scientific knowledge which gives to science its special authority"[1]

My personal opinion is that science is something based on facts, obtained by "experimental methods" which are evaluated as to give us information about the specific area studied. This is also the definition of science in this essay.

What is a fact then? My own definition is that a fact is something that has been proven true, whether it is through experiments or observations only. What seems to be true for a certain period of time might not be true for another one and that is important to keep in mind. The book The Nature of Knowing suggests the following as a definition of a fact: "Something is a fact if it is generally agreed to be true, correct or acceptable."[2] A good explanation I would say. Facts might also be evidence emerged from experiments. What is a fact and what is not might differ from person to person. In psychology for example, psychologists carry out experiments to prove their hypothesis. However these experiments often turn out to be correct for seven persons out of ten or so and are considered facts anyway. This is an example of our tendency to generalize and simplify reality as much as possible. People tend to regard assumptions as facts and thereby interpret things wrong.

Why are we so interested in collecting all these facts then? I would say we need them in our striving for a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us. They are needed to obtain knowledge. There is an important difference between a fact and knowledge, namely that the facts will exist no matter what you do, whereas knowledge acquires you to understand the facts, evaluate them and respond to them. Facts are obviously fundamental for knowledge to exist. Facts are needed to obtain knowledge and you need knowledge to do science. How do we collect the facts and process them then? In the natural and social sciences we obtain facts by observing various phenomena and build up a hypothesis based on our observations and finally test them with an experiment. We get our knowledge mainly by reason and perception. We process what we can see, hear, feel and perhaps taste and then use logical reasoning to conclude what is happening. The result is traditionally called a law or a theory. Scientific laws are mainly generalizations, built up upon certain patterns found. In the old days the laws were prescriptive whereas today descriptive. The physicist Moritz Schlick has a good explanation of the difference between those two : "The laws of celestial mechanics do not prescribe to the planets how they have to move, as though planets would actually like to move otherwise, and are only forced by these burdensome laws of Kepler to move in ordinary paths; no, these laws do not in any way "compel" the planets, but express only what in fact the planets actually do"[3] This quote also explains what science is all about; describing the nature and other phenomena with use of facts that are processed through reasoning and perception and explained to possible new learners with use of language. To show that we need to process the facts in order to use them I have developed an example. Let's say that no one would have thought about why things dropped always fall down to the ground. This is something we observe in our everyday life and now have a good understanding of the theory behind. However it could have been such that we only observed the behaviour and perhaps used the fact to be more careful as not to drop fragile things which could break and live happily ever after. Luckily humans are curious and found out that this was due to gravitational forces. Thanks to that we could explain many other phenomena and later on even overcome it as to send out space ships and satellites to discover the space.

There is however one big problem when it comes to natural sciences, namely the Problem of Induction which explains that no matter how many measurements we have carried out in the past and under how many different circumstances, there will always be a possibility that the next instance will turn out to be totally different. This is just a matter of fact. In order to deal with this problem we use the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature which means that we assume that the nature's behaviour is constant and that we thereby will observe the same effect next time. This seems to work out quite good; however one cannot know what will happen in the future.

One subject in which we do not have any problem with this problem, is mathematics. "Mathematics is not about the natural world. If the natural world was quite different from the way it is now, mathematics would not in any way be changed. Mathematical theories are for all time."[4] This claims that mathematics differs from most other areas of knowledge, were facts are fact until someone proves them wrong. Mathematics is eternal truth, what worked out centuries ago will work out equally good today no matter how the world changed. I would say that mathematics differs from other areas of knowledge since mathematical knowledge does not acquire understanding of the tools used. It is fully possible to apply for example the good old Pythagoras' theorem and get a correct answer without knowing the theory behind. I myself have never quite understood how the mathematical tools really work and sometimes not even know what I'm doing, yet I have always got good results in mathematics. I only clustered the information I was given, applied it to the exercise and got the correct result which I could by no means explain the meaning of. One could even think of the simplest mathematics learnt in the first years of school; the addition of numbers. After doing service in a first grade class I have figured out that a lot of the children have no understanding of what they are doing at all. They have simply learnt that 2+2 =4, they have no idea what the numbers mean and why two apples plus two apples will be four ones together. Their parents have repeated this so many times for them, that they have memorized it. This is not good for their learning but how could the teachers know that they have no understanding of it when they give the correct answer?

One could perhaps say that mathematics is more about organizing the accumulation of facts rather than really process them. If you only know how to organize your piles you could end up being a rather good mathematician. The most important thing seems to be to know how to use logical reasoning if you want to "understand" mathematics. As mathematics is quite the opposite to areas of knowledge such as arts where you learn mainly by your sense and emotions, you won't learn very much by perception. Through perception you could perha...