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by thrwyoilarticle 1752 days ago
There's a lot of value being abused in the term 'science'. Science is a highly valued concept but it's the result of following the scientific method, not the output of anyone with a postgrad.
1 comments

Science is what scientists do, like politics is what politicians do? Either science can be critiqued as a social construct or it is an unimpeachable Platonic aspiration. I can see both perspectives. But, communicating that science itself is a somewhat messy social phenomena might be better as a long-term message for the public.
Politics is definitely not defined as what politicians do and science is, as the GP said, when somone follows the scientific method which is something that happens all the time, far from a Platonic aspiration.
Yes, despite the demarcation problem, I think there is.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/

And I think the demarcation problem can be in some ways be solved by distinguishing on predictivity.

Right. Nice article. Tldr; no, not really, "the scientific method" is rhetoric.

Though i will say that they missed Robert Hooke's essay on the scientific method. I swear no one knows about this (even though Hooke was a founding and seminal member of the English Royal Society) because Hooke sounds insane. Who makes titles like this? I love it:

A scheme, or idea of the present state of natural philosophy, and how its defects may be remedied by a methodical proceeding in the making experiments and collecting observations wereby to compile a natural history, as to the solid basis for the superstructure of philosophy