2.7 The Scientific Community

It is very difficult to solve complex problems on your own. Luckily, science is a collective process. Even if you do work on your own you always build on foundations laid by others. Our knowledge would grow too slowly if every scientist were to invent the wheel every time they solved a problem. Therefore, science is also an open process. By sharing their results through publications scientists help each other make progress and all researchers within a field benefit from this. This open, collaborative aspect of research is called the scientific community. When starting out in research it is important to get to know it and to start interacting with it.

The scientific community has many subcommunities. The most obvious one consists of the people that you work with every day, such as your closest colleagues and your supervisor. Another fairly obvious subcommunity is the people working within your subdiscipline, whether it is behavioral ecology, laser spectroscopy, or any other research field. These are the people that your research group collaborates with, and the ones you meet at scientific conferences. Disciplines such as physics and chemistry are on an intermediate level, and the top level includes all people that have ever worked with, and ever will work with, scientific research. Some parts of the scientific community are very closely connected, sharing techniques, theories and problem areas with each other. Other parts are more distantly related. Since science both builds knowledge and transfers knowledge between people it can be seen as a web that interconnects all nations and all times. Every node of the web is a scientist, every thread is a transfer of knowledge. When you read scientific papers you can follow those threads by looking at the reference list at the end. Scientists who have made a great contribution to science have more threads connected to their node but each and every one who contributes to science is part of the web. I have never tried it, but I am positively sure that it is possible to follow the threads back in time through the web from any researcher today to the pioneering scientists during the renaissance.

When discussing scientific method, it is interesting to ask if research should be considered to be “unscientific” if it falls outside the inductive or hypothetico-deductive framework. Much research does. Some scientists get research grants and academic prizes for developing new measurement techniques, without ever explaining any natural phenomenon at all. Others use routine techniques to map out some aspect of nature. For instance, physicists who investigate the structure of atoms use established spectroscopic techniques to collect data. They proceed to interpret their spectra by established analysis techniques. The results are published in databases and are accepted as good quality research within their field, despite the fact that not a single bold hypothesis has been formulated or tested. Some philosophers of science maintain that such results become useless after a theoretical paradigm shift, since the information is incorporated in the definitions and concepts of the existing theory. As we have seen, this is not necessarily true. More importantly, we could equally well maintain that science becomes useless without such results. The quantum mechanical theory of the atomic world is obviously a great scientific breakthrough but if it were not used to analyze the structure of atoms in this way we would not be able to use atomic spectra to other scientific ends, such as analyzing the composition of distant stars. This would obviously be an impediment to our ability to develop theories about the evolution of stars. Without the tedious everyday work with established theories, the theories become museum pieces, to be admired but never put to use. Science builds on itself, using established theories to develop new knowledge. New theories are not developed by individuals but by communities. Science is a much more complex, inhomogeneous, and multifaceted activity than inductivists and hypothetico-deductivists wish to let on. And even though not all science is conducted in the same manner, all science is nonetheless interconnected.

If scientists do not adhere strictly to the methods proposed by philosophers, where do they learn scientific method? In many places, a course in the philosophy of natural science is a healthy part of the Ph.D. curriculum, but the major part of the training to become a scientist takes place elsewhere. Scientific method is learnt where science is being made, under supervision by experienced researchers. It involves a wide variety of skills; the craft of operating experimental apparatus, sometimes also of designing and building this apparatus, knowing how to create experimental conditions that make it possible to obtain useful information, the craft of acquiring and interpreting data, and so forth. As a budding researcher you also learn a process of working in parallel with facts and ideas to solve research problems, generating ideas from facts, comparing ideas with facts. You learn a combination of craftmanship and mindset that, in time, will enable you to contribute in peer review processes yourself. In practice, it is these reviews by fellow scientists, and not the philosophy books, that judge what good scientific praxis is.

In this chapter we have attempted to understand what science is. We have seen that this is no easy task. Quite possibly, we are now faced with more questions than we started with. This, on the other hand, is a natural consequence of reflection on any problem. The next chapter is about how it happens that we have science at all. This is by no means as self-evident as it may seem.