Science: A Systematic Knowledge of the World
In its original sense, science (from the Latin scientia, “knowledge”) is “the sum of knowledge,” and more specifically, a systematic undertaking to construct and organize knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions.
Following in the footsteps of technology in terms of its history, science has developed in the West through universal works based on facts, argumentation, and methods that vary according to whether they are based on observation, experiment, hypothesis, deductive or inductive logic, and so on. When we divide science into different fields or disciplines, we speak of science in the plural, as in the opposition between science, technology, engineering and mathematics and the humanities and social sciences, or between the formal sciences, the natural sciences and the social sciences.
The aim of science is to understand and explain the world and its phenomena through knowledge, with the aim of deriving predictions and functional applications. It is intended to be open to criticism in terms of the knowledge acquired, the methods used to acquire it, and the argumentation used in scientific or participatory research. As part of this exercise in perpetual questioning, it is the subject of a specific philosophical discipline called epistemology. The knowledge established by science forms the basis of numerous technical developments, some of which have a considerable impact on society and its history.
Definition of Science
The word “science” can be defined in a number of ways, depending on the context in which it is used. In the first sense, it can be seen as “the sum of knowledge that an individual possesses or can acquire through study, reflection or experience.” Inherited from the Latin word scientia (Latin scientia, “knowledge”), it is ‘what we know because we have learned it, what we hold to be true in the broad sense, the body of knowledge, of studies of universal value, characterized by a given object (field) and method, and founded on verifiable objective relations [restricted sense].’
In a passage from the Banquet, Plato distinguishes between right opinion (orthos logos) and science or knowledge (episteme). Synonymous with episteme in ancient Greece, it is, according to the Pseudo-Plato Definitions, “a conception of the soul that cannot be shaken by discourse.”
The word “science,” in its strict sense, is opposed to opinion (“doxa” in Greek), an assertion that is by nature arbitrary. However, the relationship between opinion on the one hand and science on the other is not so systematic; the historian of science Pierre Duhem believes that science is rooted in common sense, that it must “save appearances.”
Scientific discourse is opposed to superstition and obscurantism. However, opinion can become an object of science, or even a scientific discipline in its own right. The sociology of science analyzes the relationship between science and opinion. In common parlance, science is opposed to belief, and by extension, science is often seen as opposed to religion. However, this consideration is often more nuanced by scientists and religious leaders alike.
The very idea of knowledge production is problematic: many fields recognized as scientific do not aim to produce knowledge, but rather instruments, machines and technical devices. Terry Shinn has proposed the notion of “technico-instrumental research.” His work with Bernward Joerges on the subject of “instrumentation” has shown that the criterion of “scientificity” is not confined to the sciences of knowledge alone.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the word “science” defined the institution of science, i.e., all scientific communities working to improve human knowledge and technology, in its international, methodological, ethical, and political dimensions. We speak of “science.”
However, there is no agreed definition of the term. The epistemologist André Pichot writes that it is “utopian to want to give an a priori definition of science.” Science historian Robert Nadeau, for his part, explains that it is “impossible to review here all the demarcation criteria proposed by epistemologists over the last hundred years, [and that] we cannot apparently formulate a criterion that excludes everything we want to exclude, and retains everything we want to retain.”
