Abstract
Moral issues concerning the use and abuse of science are broached in this chapter. Scientists have responsibilities to conduct their research in such a way as to respect and acknowledge the contributions of others and to present their work honestly and without seeking to avoid criticism by misleadingly overestimating random error. The onus on scientists of a wider social responsibility for informing the public and guiding decision makers is also discussed, together with the reciprocal responsibilities of decision makers to ensure that they are informed and able to understand the bearing of new knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
But a more general claim by Koyré that it would not have been possible to carry out any of the experiments and observations Galileo reported goes too far. Settle (1961) repeated an experiment on inclined planes in accordance with Galileo’s description, which Koyré had described as completely worthless, and found the ingenious device for measuring time gave quite precise results—certainly precise enough to attain the relations of proportion between distance and times that Galileo claimed. Koyré maintained further that Galileo’s procedure couldn’t possibly furnish a reasonable value of the constant of proportionality appearing in the algebraic expression of this relation of proportion. But as Settle points out, this modern way of expressing the law of free fall by writing distance as a function of time was not the way Galileo expressed the relation, which was weaker and didn’t entail all that the modern functional expression does.
- 2.
Note that in modern usage introduced towards the end of Sect. 2.2, we should say “precision” rather than “accuracy”.
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Needham, P. (2020). The Use and Abuse of Science. In: Getting to Know the World Scientifically. Synthese Library, vol 423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40216-7_4
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