Defining Science

Attempts to define the word “science” offer many variations, none of which may be complete or fully satisfactory. The word “science,” a derivative from the Latin scientia, simply means knowledge. We know that any person with great knowledge is not necessarily a scientist, as we currently use the word. On the other hand, the word “philosophy,” a derivative from Greek, means love of wisdom. When combined with the word “nature” to form “Natural Philosophy,” the phrase seems to refer to the knowledge of nature; it is more specific. Until fairly recently, sci­ence was, indeed, referred to as natural philosophy. The full title of Isaac Newton’s monumental work is Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

For reasons not easy to trace, the name natural philosophy was dropped for the preferred name, science. The intellectual dis­tance between science and philosophy, for a time, increased, until about the early part of the twentieth century, when some of the best known scientists started philosophizing on such concepts as space, time, matter, and energy. Philosophers, in turn, found a new topic ripe with possibilities: the philosophy of science.

Returning to the phrase “natural philosophy,” the word “natu­ral” simply signifies nature. Thus, science may be understood to indicate curiosity about or knowledge, even love, of nature. If sci­ence is the study and knowledge of nature, we mean nature minus man. Man and nature are thus placed as dipoles, with man at one polarity taking a position from which he can study nature for play, curiosity, admiration, or even exploitation and gain. Nature, on the other hand, “just lies there,” like an animal caged in a zoo, or worse, like a cadaver for a student’s study by dissection.

As if to protest such harsh statements, in nature we have not just the inanimate part, but the animate part as well, and the above statement may be justified only for the inanimate part. The study of the animate part is broadly covered under biology with various specialties. The medical sciences, as a group, are a good example of where the polarity of man and nature gets blurred, since man himself—with life—is the subject of study, combining other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biol­ogy. What about technology? Much of the admiration accorded to science is derived from its accomplishments through its deriv­ative, technology. Like a full-grown son beside his aging father, technology stands tall and broad, dependent yet defiant. With this attempt to define science broadly, we may briefly look at some definitions available:

• “Comprehension or understanding of the truths or facts of any subject” (Webster’s Dictionary).
• “The progressive improvement of man’s understanding of Nature” (Encyclopedia Britannica).
• “[T]he study of those judgments concerning which univer­sal agreement can be obtained” (Norman Campbell, What Is Science? (New York, NY, Dover, 1953).
• “[E]ssentially a purposive continuation of . . . what I have called common knowledge, but carried out in a more sys­tematic manner, and to a much higher degree of exactitude and refinement” (E. W. Hobson, The Domain of Natural Science (New York, NY, Dover, 1968).

These being only a few of the many definitions offered for sci­ence, we venture to add one more: Science is the activity directed toward a systematic search for, or confirmation of, the relations between events of nature.

Source: Srinagesh K (2005), The Principles of Experimental Research, Butterworth-Heinemann; 1st edition.