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Is reasoning the main WOK in the Natural sciences? What role does it play?


Yaroslav

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I read somewhere that reasoning is the main way of knowing in the natural sciences as it involves the use of all three truth tests: the coherence test, the correspondence test, and the pragmatic test.

Can anyone comment on this? what does is it mean when it says "as it involves the use of all three truth tests"?

What role does Reason play in Natural sciences?

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Forgot what the correspondence one was. I just googled it, and this site explains it in depth: http://en.wikipedia....dge_(IB_course

Just search for correspondence on that page, and you'll find links to all three theories you were looking for.

To summarize, coherence theory says if it makes sense with everything else you know to be true, then this new piece of knowledge is true. So if you know that animal X is a mammal and suspect that it doesn't have fur or hair at any point in its life, then the coherence theory says that something's wrong. Something's not true.

Pragmatism is talking about if the new piece of knowledge is practical, based on experiences.

Correspondence is if what you think you know corresponds to something in the real world.

I wish I could elaborate more, but I only read a summary, and I don't remember it very well. Truth isn't a topic that I'm very comfortable with in my understanding :blum:

I don't really understand the justification for reason being the main way of knowing in natural sciences. Those test are based on reasoning, so it seems like circular reasoning.... o.0

Anyways, I think language, perception, and emotion also play great roles in the natural sciences. Empirical evidence is very important, as is communication of knowledge and ideas. As for emotion, it's ingrained in us and our motivations and colors how we interpret our findings as scientists.

But what role does reason play?

It helps us make sense of what we see. Dichotomous/taxonomic keys and cladograms are visual representations of our reasoning in biology.

And all the math in chemistry and physics shows reasoning. These are just shallow examples because reasoning is what we do. We have questions and are curious. To try to find answers, we use reason. We try to think ahead when we collect data. We learn from others' mistakes. We ask more questions and make connections. While you could say that reason is the main WOK in the natural sciences, I wouldn't.. I'd say reason helps drive us forward to more knowledge and even more questions because it allows us to methodologically get results, even if they are all negative, so that we don't have to repeat the same things over and over again. We use deduction and induction to get hypotheses so that we may know where to look for an answer. And nothing is foolproof. Even if we think we have certainty, we sometimes stumble upon something we overlooked that changes everything. We use models and try to simplify in physics, and we learn so much from it, but sometimes, we realize that we got our models all wrong. We learn from mistakes as much as from successes, and while there are great examples of how we use reason in the natural sciences, our thought process uses reasoning. Even if we wanted to be irrational, I don't think we could completely succeed. That's my take on it, anyways.

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