Abstract
The feature that distinguishes science from other ways of understanding and explaining the world is an ultimate reliance on the authority of the experimental test. There must be some agreed-on way of determining which facts are relevant to the credibility of our theories, and a willingness to place our theories at hazard in the process.
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Reference Notes
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Copyright 1961 by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.
Gerald J. Holton, Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science, 2nd ed. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1973).
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Suggested Reading
On the question whether scholarly research in the humanities is like scientific research, the reader is referred to the article by Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in History and Theory 1 (1960), for a negative view. The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff (3rd ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) is a guide to research in history. It does not make any claim that history is a science, but the reader is free to compare the methods of historical research described there with those of science, and come to his or her own conclusion. Another example of a work of literary scholarship which brings out the parallels between scholarly and scientific research is John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
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© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Goldstein, M., Goldstein, I. (1984). Science-The Experimental Test. In: The Experience of Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0384-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0384-6_12
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