Blackwell Reference Online

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Science seeks to describe, explain, and predict features of the natural and social worlds. Scientists try to develop theories or explanations of phenomena by means of producing bodies of empirical evidence that play a major role in determining whether theories are accepted, modified, or rejected. In general, scientists seek theories that are logically consistent, empirically testable, well supported by available empirical evidence (and not too severely contradicted by other available evidence), parsimonious or simple, and that continue to be a source of new ideas and lines of research. Scientists also generally seek to produce theories that yield a unified understanding of the phenomena they study. For example, Wilson (1998) talks of consilience , and some physical scientists claim they are moving very close to a “theory of everything” ( Barrow 2001 ). In the early decades of the twentieth century the Vienna Circle of logical positivists insisted that science consisted only of those propositions which could be verified by facts drawn from experience. However, Popper (1959) responded by arguing that theories could never be verified because a scientist can never possess all of the possible facts bearing on a theory. Popper's solution to this problem was that the scientist had to proceed in a sort of reverse manner, by trying to falsify rather than verify a theory. In fact, ... log in or subscribe to read full text