Science and research

August 14, 2011, 8:26 pm

by Carlo Fonseka

When I was a member of the University Grants Commission, (UGC) the Center for Advanced Studies (a creation of the educational visionary Prof. Senake Bandaranayake) conducted a workshop on ‘Research Methodology and Thesis Writing’. I was required to make a 20 – minute presentation on the subject of ‘Science and Research’. In the context of the on-going dialogue on that subject in the columns of The Island, I thought the Editor might be interested in the presentation I made. What follows is the text of my presentation.

Text

To talk meaningfully on the subject of Science and Research in 20 minutes is a tall order but it must be attempted. Let me begin with a banality. Like all living things, human beings seek to avoid suffering and pursue happiness, as best as they can. We try to do that on the basis of judgments we make about the nature of the world we live in. We make judgments about our physical environment, our fellow beings and our own selves. These judgments are computations of our brains based on information about different aspects of the world obtained through sense organs such as our eyes and ears.

Appearance and Reality

Our attempt to avoid suffering and to pursue happiness will be successful only to the extent that our judgments about the world correspond to the real nature of the world. These judgments are not always reliable because, apart from being prone to corrigible error, our brains are also susceptible to delusions, illusions and hallucinations. A delusion is a demonstrably false belief which is persisted in despite verifiable evidence to the contrary. Delusions are a well known symptom of insanity. Illusions are false interpretations of some real objects or phenomena. A classic example is a mirage. Hallucinations are objectless sensations i.e. perceptions of non-existing things. e. g. hearing voices when nobody is speaking and seeing visions that others cannot see. Hallucinations are usually evidence of mental disorder. Because humans have an insight into how their brains work, they have collectively discovered a method for minimizing error and thereby making their judgments about the world more reliable. That method is the method of science as a technique. As Karl Marx famously said, "all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided." Judgments we make by scientific method constitute what we truly know about the world i.e. knowledge. In this view, knowledge consists of judgments based on perceptions and verified by critically evaluated experience i.e. empirically verified.

Necessary and Sufficient

In such a context, a question immediately poses itself: What are the conditions that must be satisfied before one can validly claim to know something truly? For example, that you know that somebody else’s cigarette can kill you or that there will be an insurrection in this country this year. To answer these questions, we have to discuss however briefly the theory of knowledge, that is the branch of philosophy called epistemology. The question we have to discuss is this: What are the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for you to claim validly that you really know something? As philosopher A. J. Ayer has lucidly expounded in his book called The Problem of Knowledge (1956) three conditions have to be satisfied.

First: what you claim to know must be true.

Second: you must be sure it is true.

Third: you must have the right to be sure that it is true.

Research

Let it be said at once that research – more accurately research using scientific methodology – is essentially concerned with establishing your right to be sure that your claim to knowledge is a valid one. Let me illustrate the matter by taking a simple example. Suppose you say that you know that there is a mango tree in a certain garden in Mihintale. For you to claim that you really know that there is such a mango tree, first of all, there really must be a mango tree in the garden in question. Though necessary, the fact that there is indeed a mango tree in that garden is not sufficient to validate your claim to knowledge of it. If you had just guessed that there is a mango tree in that garden and your guess had turned out to be true, you cannot claim to have really known it. It was just an instance of a guess which happen to be true. Such an instance does not constitute true knowledge. Therefore in addition to the fact that there is a mango tree in that garden, another condition must be fulfilled to validate your claim to a definite piece of knowledge. That second condition is that you must be sure on the basis of some evidence that there is such a tree. For example, you should have seen it one or more times or seen a photograph of it. But even such subjective certainty on your part that there is such a tree is not sufficient to validate your claim to true knowledge. Why not? Because like everybody else’s brain, your brain too is subject to delusions, illusions and hallucinations. Therefore, a third condition must be satisfied before you can claim true knowledge that there is such a tree. That third condition is that you must have the right to be sure. As has been emphasized already, it is research using a particular methodology that will give you the right to be sure. The essence of the matter is that your claim must be based on evidence and your evidence must be verifiable by other competent observers. Why must this be so? Because what is not publicly checkable may become a matter of disagreement and whenever there is an irresolvable disagreement, we reach a dead end.

Conclusion

So it comes about that the research (methodology and data) on which you base your claim to a particular piece of knowledge e.g. that Rajarata Chronic Kidney Disease is caused by arsenic, must be made available to others for their critical scrutiny and evaluation. There is a standard way in which claims to knowledge are made public. It takes the format of a scientific paper. A scientific paper consists of five parts.

1 Introduction – which serves to define the problem being researched in the form of an empirically testable hypothesis.

2 Methodology – which describes the precise methods that were used to conduct the research.

3 Results – which represent the observations (findings) of the research.

4 Analysis of results – by logical reasoning and if appropriate by the use of statistical techniques.

5 Discussion – to establish your claim to knowledge.