WHO REALLY CREATES SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE?
So maybe there is no new method, unique to science, that scientists have to use to make any progress; and maybe scientific knowledge is not a special separate kind of knowledge, either; but surely scientists are the people who create scientific knowledge. Right?
Part 2 of the Myth of Magical Science goes something like this:
Scientific Knowledge can only be developed by professional scientists.
It's just not that simple. We're not particularly talking about the old story of science being done in big projects and the gals with the Ph.D.s getting all the credit, either. This discussion is not about who gets credit for anything -- it's about what actually happens in the creation of what we call scientific knowledge.
Two aspects of this problem are easy to understand, once you think about them. The first concerns the initial creation or development or discovery of a particular fact or principle; the second concerns the dissemination of this new knowledge.
Regarding the first aspect, remember what we discussed in the preceding section about background knowledge?
"Our understanding of ourselves and our world, and our understanding of science itself, retains an unknown quantity of pre-scientific beliefs and practices which have never been studied scientifically and are assumed to be true and workable."
That background knowledge was not created by scientists:
"Our ancestors, human and non human, have had hundreds of millions of years of biological and social (cultural) evolution for working on getting these things right."
That is not the end of it, though. New "background knowledge" is being created all the time. I don't know if we are still evolving biologically (probably we are) but we are certainly still evolving socially and culturally.
If you look at the history of science, you'll see that the advancement of knowledge was always a dance between the non-scientists and the scientists who were both interested in some particular aspect of the natural world. One favorite example is the way that artists and the scientists played off of each other's discoveries about light and color and perspective and so on.
This is still going on today, not just between engineers and mathematicians and scientists, but between all the people who are really interested in anything and scientists. Here's another historical example: The woman who developed the beginnings of modern descriptive statistics was neither a scientist nor a mathematician -- she was a nurse. Her name was Florence Nightingale, and she planted the roots of modern nursing while she was inventing statistics, showing that the British Army was losing more soldiers to unsanitary hospital conditions than to enemy fire.
The second aspect concerns the dissemination of new knowledge, whatever it's origins may have been. Science is a communal function. Obviously, when we talk about scientific understanding of some particular phenomenon or principle, we mean more than that someone discovered it or developed an understanding of it: We mean that they discussed it with their colleagues, who may have helped to refine it in various ways; we mean that they published it professionally, so that any interested scientist could get a shot at it; but we mean more even than all that.
At this point the community of people who are participating in understanding this particular slab of science is still mostly confined to members of various research teams -- scientists, in a somewhat broad sense of the word. We may wonder just how broad: Is a secretary, who points out that a particular way of expressing a key point is ambiguous, a scientist? Lets say that he is -- that any member of the research team is a scientist in this broad sense of the term. Even with such a broad definition of the term "scientist," the process of developing a scientific understanding of a phenomenon or principle extends beyond the community of scientists per se.
Even if we were only interested in scientists, scientists in the narrowest possible sense of the word, and their understanding of a scientific principle, we still would have to consider where the next generation of scientists is going to come from. They are going to be people who have learned about the discoveries and the still unanswered questions in that particular discipline, and have divided to devote quite a lot of time to learning more about it. So anyone who contributes to helping people understand that discipline is training scientists or improving the training of scientists, and thus participating in developing the scientific understanding of that particular phenomenon or principle.
We are talking about teachers, of course, but also science writers and librarians and people who produce PBS videos and on and on, as far as you would care to go. But this section is already quite long, so let's leave it at that for now. (This topic seems to want it's own page.)
For now, let's consider just one example to bring this down to earth a bit: The original proof of a new mathematical principle is sometimes so complicated and long that even the person or team that proved it cannot really understand it completely. Once a proof is completed, though, people are inspired to study it, clarify it and simplify it. It may drop from a hundred pages or more, to fifty and then to twenty or so, and finally to five or ten pages that could be understood by a dedicated high school student. As I see it, everybody involved contributed to the development of that particular slab of knowledge.
As more and more people gain access to high quality information about science, this process becomes more and more efficient. Who knows what effect the World Wide Web will have, as it fosters discussion (and participation) by any interested people, and makes self training in practically any discipline steadily easier.
In this brave new world, science will be the business of anyone who cares to devote time and resources to working on it; and the professional scientist may take her rightful place as the facilitator of the general public devotion to improved understanding.
You can already see this happening. Some students are begining as early as junior high school to do research projects that are considered, by scientists specializing in research on their chosen topics, to be valuable contributions to scientific understanding. For example, consider some of the entrants in the Science Talent Search.
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