Science as a Language

Abstract

There are almost as many ways to approach an investigation of the nature of science as there are investigators. Historically, two points of view have been taken, each of which has led to fruitful results. Science has been viewed either as a method of acquiring knowledge or as a systematic body of knowledge. All through history, however, the idea of a system has been a regulative one in the minds of scientists. Even if a specific method had to be used, the feeling was that one had no science until the information gathered could be expressed in systematic form. In fact a great deal of the controversy over the question of the scientific nature of sociology or psychology seemed to revolve around this. These two fields of knowledge were not systematic and hence did not have the formal appearance of sciences. The best example of a system is to be found in geometry and for this reason the deductive form came to be the ideal of all scientists, a form each ardently desired for the particular branch of science in which his interest lay. The work of people like David Hilbert and the Formalist school of logic soon revealed the fact that the structure of geometry was not peculiar in any way to geometry but one which could be generalized and applied to many fields.