Choosing to take a bounded view: Finding out about the cosmos using our senses

Science is gaining knowledge about the world, though not all possible knowledge.  Science is knowledge that is methodologically acquired.  Science is the sort of knowledge that can be agreed on as being entirely objective, rather than subjective.  That means it excludes beliefs and personal opinions.  Scientific knowledge is knowledge that can be understood to stand apart from human beings.  Scientific facts are considered to be such even if we were not here- yes, even all of us.  Yet that is an impossibility, for Science, the organised business of finding out things about world, about matter and chemicals and life and whatever there is, is a human activity.  Science is done by scientists, obviously!  And the knowledge that we call Science is shared amongst human society.  So we are playing a game, if you like. (Games are serious. They have rules, and we get upset if someone cheats.) We are being human and doing this thing we call Science, while pretending, all at once and at the same time, that it isn't us doing it at all, though we all realise that it has to be.  

Science, this means of knowing, is one of the ways of knowing about things that we call Disciplines (itself a word very similar in meaning to 'scientia,' i.e. knowledge).  History and Psychology and Geography and Mathematics are disciplines too- they also collect and organise their sorts of knowledge, but the rules we set for them are different.  To give one example: in contrast to the sciences, History is absolutely allowed to gather evidence that is subjective.  A few particular people wrote about the events of the Great Fire of London, and that's really only how we know about it. Pepy's diary includes some documentary facts, such as which street the bakery fire started in, but also some opinions and personal views of the author, or the other people whose viewpoints the diary writer thought important and thus collated.  This is different to doing science.  In Science, we decide that it cannot be important who measures the temperature of the flames, how long the fire burns for, or finding out the types of materials that survive the inferno.  For Science, the matters of interest are, in principle, natural phenomena that are repeatable, while for History, this type of enquiry is centred on the uniqueness of circumstances, a degree of free agency of the (intelligent) actors concerned, and following from this selective evidence, the individual interpretation of the particular historian.  Science imposes limits on itself, excluding the unique events of human history and so on.  The overlaps and boundaries between disciplines are important, but I will discuss that another time.

So we've considered what Science considers its proper study.  Now we need to understand what will count as valid evidence.  By what means can we collect information about what the world is made of, how it works, and interacts through time?  The assumption of the Natural Sciences is that the cosmos is an orderly and regular place. If a ball rolls down a hill today, it will behave in the same way tomorrow, and for the same reasons. It will do this under the same circumstances that recur anywhere- even at the far reaches of the universe, we would now assert.  These phenomena are observed and measured by means of our full suite of sense perceptions: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste (NB Risk assessment may be needed here!) and so on, because we have come to agreement that most human beings have the same experience of these phenomena. So any and all scientists will reasonably expect to sense the same events and generate the same data and outcomes.  

To emphasise again: the assumption that the cosmos is orderly implies that all the important things we want to know about will happen over and over again, especially if we set up experimental procedures to replicate the initial conditions of the investigation.  Matter will behave in the same ways, chemicals will react in the same ways, and living things will function in the same ways.  Scientists have continued to assert that such natural phenomena will consistently behave in lawful, predictable ways, and if we find exceptions, it is to be expected that some confounding variable has remained hidden thus far, which more careful study and experimentation will inevitably uncover.  You will likely know that science now speaks of uncertainty as a part of natural phenomena, and this itself is now thought to conform to broader predictable criteria or 'laws'.  So, importantly, 'Nature' (to use the shorthand) is not characterised by randomness, but by regularity.

But we might need help- and this is now the norm.  Once the large scale phenomena that are evident to human senses at the human scale had been thoroughly documented and investigated, we turned to the study of events that are fast or slow, very small or very large, or very far away.  All these sorts of things require enhancements to our senses, and we have invented a wide range of devices that have the same general purpose: to extend the reach and sensitivity of our common senses.   Examples are illustrated below (in no particular order).

Whether we are talking about colour changes in the extract of red cabbage leaves which tells us about the concentration of hydrogen ions in a weak aqueous solution, or the minuscule changes in the length of the two arms of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, our measuring devices are indicating to us phenomena and changes in the world that 'simply' need to be scaled up or down so we can observe them, or are translated from one form to another to produce a proxy reading.  But the claim we are making is the same as it was before we devised such instruments.  Our senses are taken to be reliable means of gathering valid and accurate information about the world. In the same way, our modern instruments are also shown by their reliability to be extending the scope of our senses to give further data about the world that is completely consistent with what we knew when unassisted.  If there are exceptions, and we now know there are, we can cross-reference our observations by different means to establish the boundaries between these differences and explore the reasons for them within those boundaries.  The boundaries of Science itself become firmer when we realise, for example, that the phenomena of nerve impulses and brain activities do fall within the bounds of regularity and predictability, whereas the larger-scale matters of human behaviours do not.  While science and the scientific method likely inform and significantly assist the study of such behaviour, in both cases of health and of disease, we now separate off the study and pursuit of knowledge in that realm under a different heading, such as (clinical) psychology.

Is it now obvious (I might say with a class of students...) that discussion of the claims that some may make about supernatural entities and events simply cannot fall within the purview of science, as they are not likely to be either freely repeatable or measurable by the selected methods of science.  This does not in any way disqualify the possibility that such entities exist or that such phenomena occur.  Nothing here contradicts Science or 'breaks' scientific laws.  It is simply that case that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there is no scientific reason to forbid that 'there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Scientia.'  A rational response would be to be sceptical until some form of evidence is presented and investigated, according to appropriate disciplinary criteria.  Such criteria need not be, primarily at least, those of the core business of Science.  There are other possibilities.

1.  Graphics: Composite of Free to Use icons