/edu/ - Education

>I think it's pathetic
Okay, but what is science? I haven't heard an answer from this guy, just a critique. I just finished a long book, The Invention of Science, that pretty persuasively argues that some of things that distinguished the new discipline of science in the Renaissance from previous methods was the emphasis on experimentation, reproducibility, and testing/verification. You have to have a community where people publish their work and read the work of others in order to accomplish these things. Simply coming up with an idea is not science. People invented or discovered many things in history before the idea of science was realized, it doesn't mean they were secretly doing science. Science isn't simply the acquisition of new knowledge, it's a particular method of doing it. There are some strong critiques of the modern peer review institutions that can be made, but if you throw out the very idea of a community you don't really have science anymore.

>>7532
This is reasonable, but you can still have group-bias within a community. Science needs to be open to the hole of society.

>>7532
>experimentation, reproducibility, and testing/verification
Oh yeah I missed one. Perhaps the most important thing to accomplishing the rest of these was publishing your methodology. This is what for example distinguished the new science of chemistry from the old woo of alchemy. Alchemy books often attempted to hide their made-up bullshit behind a veil of extremely arcane esoterica and this paradoxically enhanced their credulity in the read by through the allure of secret, forbidden knowledge. There was a very conscious and deliberate demand by new institutions dedicated to the advancement of chemistry that whenever someone wanted to publish in their journals they had to describe their methodology to a sufficient degree that others could reproduce their results.

If someone is unwilling to publish or barred from publishing their findings (this is where the critique of institutionalized publishing arises), others have no means of reproducing them and you cannot establish a scientific process.

>>7534
>Alchemy books often attempted to hide their made-up bullshit behind a veil of extremely arcane esoterica and this paradoxically enhanced their credulity in the read by through the allure of secret, forbidden knowledge. There was a very conscious and deliberate demand by new institutions dedicated to the advancement of chemistry that whenever someone wanted to publish in their journals they had to describe their methodology to a sufficient degree that others could reproduce their results.
They went from trust me bro to show me bro