This question keeps popping up in numerous threads, particularly in the common anathema that a particular position is "unscientific", though such a position might be held by otherwise respectable scientists. So I figure we might as well duke it out in a separate thread in order to settle the matter once and for all.

Here's Judge Overton's take in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education:

Of these, I would only consider (3) to be essential. . . .

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin

What is Science, you ask?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

One of my faves. Here's his synopsis:Skepticism, in other words.

Sounds good to me as long as "experience" is taken to be empirical experience, rather than, say, mystical experience. That's an open, pluralistic definition that allows maximum freedom of inquiry.

But somehow I'll bet that KenG won't find it entirely satisfying since Intelligent Design theory and the Anthropic Principle could be construed as real science under Feynman's definition. . . .

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin

I can't imagine much "duking" is needed. Wiki has a pretty good definition of science and quite a bit of discussion. Scientists are generally not too interested in philosophy.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Excellent thread, Warren.

You are certainly correct that the judge's definition of science is far more complete than Feynman's, but this does not leave me unsatisfied-- I love Feynman precisely because his goal is never to supply a complete or exhaustive view of anything, it is to supply a blindingly simple flash of insight that makes sense of the complete and exhaustive definition. That's just what Feynman always does, and this is perfectly par for the course. It would be missing the point entirely to substitute Feynman's definition for a complete definition of what we call science, just as his book on QED would never pass as a graduate textbook in that subject. I suspect, with Cougar, that Wiki's discussion of what science is is most likely a pretty good and fairly complete reference on that topic, but I will never miss a word by Feynman to help me make sense of the whys.

By the way, Feynman goes on to talk about science as a means for making sure you don't fool yourself, recognizing that you are the easiest person to fool. That's just brilliant, and puts both ID and anthropic thinking into its proper perspective, I would say. This is the point I have been making-- the test of science is not whether or not it affords you with a warm fuzzy feeling of understanding something, it is whether or not you can make a testable prediction that actually plays out. The understanding is a kind of byproduct that is still an important piece, and is the motivation for Occam's Razor, but it cannot be the sole content. If it is, then you have philosophy not science.

That is silly, Cougar. Science, the definition and such, are subsets of philosophy. The scientific method is a philosophical argument. Objectivity, observation, validity, nullification, induction, deduction, experimentation are all philosophically derived 'tools' used in science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

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jwj

It's ok not to know. We should try harder to find out.

I didn't really see much of a "definition of science" from that Feynman presentation, so how can you back up your claim?

Intelligent Design is not a theory and is not science. Again, Wiki has a decent discussion, part of which states:

Intelligent design is the claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer. Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute, believe the designer to be God. Intelligent design's advocates claim it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations.

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own. The National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience. Others have concurred, and some have called it junk science.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Do you mean, not one that you agree with?

In my view, Feynman's goal in "defining" science as he does is quite similar to his discussion of "energy". He mentions that at some point, you do have to define energy, and use the term in a jargony kind of way among other practitioners who have gone through the same process, but he doesn't feel it should be the first thing you do when you try to explain something. So Feynman is looking for the first thing you should do when you try to understand what science is, and that is not quite the same thing as a "definition", even though he uses that word. In his presentation, he is not interested in the formal definition of science, because it is not his goal to be able to say if ID or anthropic thinking are science, his goal is to try and see what science is at its most fundamental level. That in turn can be used to go on and find a more formal definition, which is useful for treating explicit examples. And by the way, Feynman's characterization of science as a kind of form of constrained skepticism is entirely consistent with my assertions that anthropic thinking is not science, expressly because gaining a warm fuzzy feeling of understanding something without testing is just about the biggest target there is when it comes to the need for skepticism.

Call it what you like, but it is generally true. What's there to ponder and investigate about formal logic? If A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C. This is a tool used by scientists, not a field of investigation.... (well, except in rare cases. See Keith Devlin, and Goodbye, Descartes in particular).

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Like most scientists, and probably most people, Feyman is more interested in showing the wonder of how science works, than on formalising what it is. Personally, I think that both questions are valuable, but the former is often the most illuminating, even as a tentative reply to the latter.

Although the philosophy of science is one of my guilty pleasures, I must observe that it tends to be more reactive than creative.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No. Of course I agree with most of what Feynman has ever said, and I've read most of what he wrote, which unfortunately isn't that much. I ALWAYS remember and totally agree with his story about the names of birds....

Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."

He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody's name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say "the Fitz-Cronin effect," and I ask "What is the effect?" and I can't remember the name.

Feynman's presentation is a great talk with many good lessons, but essentially, well, it's too long and variously focused to be a "definition of science."

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Scientists ignore philosophy at their own peril; whatever science is, we can be sure that it is a subset of philosophy. After all, if you get a Ph.D. in a science, what does the "Ph" stand for?

From hhEb09'1's post:
Well, it's not very comfortable having to defend ID theory, but after all, they're just doing what Feynman suggests by taking a fresh look at Darwinism and making sure that it can really explain everything previous generations told us it could. Just because ID theory will most likely turn out to be false, at least with respect to biological evolution, that in itself doesn't make ID theory unscientific. If anything, ID has spurred evolutionary research into things like cilia and thus has indirectly contributed to true scientific progress.

As for the wiki article:

Certainly human artifacts are "features" of the universe, and they were clearly intelligently designed. And their (the Ideists') fundamental question: What would be the difference between an intelligently designed organism versus a naturally evolved organism is a worthwhile question. I mean, if you found some Roundup-Ready soy beans, how could you tell they were genetically engineered and not naturally evolved if you did not know for sure ahead of time that Roundup-Ready soy beans were in fact genetically engineered?

Before Darwin, ID theory (e.g., Paley's Natural Theology) was all there was. One could have maintained Hume's skepticism regarding ID, but there was no positive alternative at the time. So if ID theory was scientific back in 1850, then why isn't it now?

Instead of hurling insults, my advice to the opponents of ID is to simply say it's false.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin

A judge is defining science?

I've read too many stories about how they do not even properly interpret even very clearly written legislation.

Something like an American Science Institute, composed of bona-fide scientists, should have stepped in with a sworn affadavit signed by all the scientists which said, "Science is x..."

Oh, that's right - sworn affadavits are no longer allowed in most courtrooms, so everyone has to appear in person to be "deposed" by both sides in a very lengthy and costly process...

And, uh, well, yeah, the other thing. Judges are lawyers first, the ones who write the laws in the first place.

Uhm, ... yeah.

I think I've pretty much figured out why a judge is spending perhaps several hundred thousand dollars of everyone's time and money deciding on the definition of science instead of simply taking 5 minutes and referring to the dictionary or just looking it up on a reliable encyclopedia, if a more precise definition is needed.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. A human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

Excellent question, Warren. It's because of the paradigm shifts in science.

Also, excellent advice to just say "no." Sadly, when the local majority wants to change the science textbooks and my son Johnny will get his head crammed with nonsense, sometimes you have to do a bit more, like take things to (ugh) court.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. A human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

Good point. I agree that philosophy and its methodologies are a crucial part of defining what science is, but at that point you leave philosophy behind and start doing science. If you then begin re-integrating philosophy into the science itself, you are doing what I call natural philosophy, and I would say that the exclusion of natural philosophy from science was its largest step forward over the last 400 years, and is largely responsible for science's great gains in that period.

This point is well taken, and shows that the Wiki article is incomplete. But what completes the picture is what I said before-- to be science, you need more than a hypothesis, you need some evidence that supports the hypothesis and some way to subject the hypothesis to further sincere scientific testing. Those are the areas where ID falls apart, not in the hypothesis itself (indeed it is the form of the hypothesis that separates ID from old creationism, but it still doesn't make it science to be able to formulate a scientific-sounding hypothesis).
Because the separation from natural philosophy was still not complete by that time. It was a long process, and still isn't finished-- indeed, it is lately