re homeopathy a respectable medical tradition in article c hlbu i a tripos com homer tripos com webster homer writes mhollowa ic sunysb edu michael holloway writes here s your error i really do think this shows some confusion on your part drum roll please science isn t so much the gathering of evidence to support an assertion read hypothesis as it is the gathering of empirical observations in order to make an hypothesis what should convince you or not shouldn t be the final product so much as how the product was made here s your error there is no observation or hypothesis that is not tainted by theory i have a theory i make observations those observations will be made with my theory in mind yes absolutely though i d make the observation in a more general sense of all observations are made by human beings and therefore made with various biases but here your message leaves talk of hypothesis and gets back once again to equating the business of science with the end result the gizmo produced science works very well at developing theories within paradigms but is very poor at dealing with paradigm shifts if i develop a novel paradigm that explains homeopathy chinese medicine or spontaneous combustion if the paradigm is useful it will show me the way to make observations that prove or disprove it my point isn t so much whether or not you have a novel paradigm but how you come about developing it the paradigm of modern medicine is that the body can be reduced to a set of essentially mechanical operations wherein disease is seen as malfunctions in the machinery essentially the old newtonian model of the world it seems likely that theories based upon this paradigm do not give a complete discription of the universe medicine healing etc indeed we now recognize an important psychological component to healing perhaps you d admit that this is an oversimplification on your part the topic of the philosophy of science is made for them i m making them too but i think that it also summarizes popular misconceptions of science and the business of doing science biomedical research doesn t make any basic assumptions that aren t the same as any other discipline of scientific research that is that you make empirical observations form an hypothesis and test it modern medicine has much more to do with biochemistry than the old newtonian model of the world and i doubt that many psychologists would appreciate being put outside this empirical world view psychology also has more to do with biochemistry than spoon bending it is also important to distinguish reason from science science may be reasonable but so are many non scientific methodologies aristotle reasoned that frogs came from mud by observing one hop out of a puddle oversimplified of course but a good example this is an empirical observa tion it was then tested though perhaps not by aristotle and eventually found wanting in the meantime some folk will have continued to believe in the spontaneous generation of animal life there s nothing at all surprising about this it s the way the gathering of knowledge works there are probably more than a few things in my own discipline of molecular biology that will be found to be totally off base even idiotic to someone in the future these future people won t have come to these relevations because they had suddenly gone all zen like and had a vision in an lsd trip someone will have thought of something new and tested it this is the bit that people who seem to relish misrepresenting science and research can t seem to wrap their minds around science is a creative process what i think of as factual and good research can be totally turned on its head tommorrow by new results and theories again i think it gets down to defining what you mean by science i often don t recognize what it is that i do and am involved in in the way science is portrayed by popular media or writings of people in the humanities they portray science as a collection of immutable facts pronouncements of truth in big gold letters that s silly its as though we just go into the lab turn over a stone and come up with a mechanism for transcriptional regula tion its much more interesting than that it really is a very human process
