Are there scientific goals?
Section snippets
The argument against scientific goals
In this section I will present the argument against scientific goals in its abstract form. In the following section I will show how this abstract argument applies in the historical case of the discovery of the basic structure of DNA in the transmission of genetic information.
Consider a simple proposal for answering the question of what exactly the scientific goals actually are for a given community at a given time. First identify the scientists in the community, then identify their goals. Since
Scientific goals and the discovery of the structure of DNA
In some ways James Watson's The Double Helix is as significant as the achievement it describes. Thirty years after its publication it has become difficult to convey to younger students that Watson's account was once regarded as a threat to science, so thoroughly has the book's message, that scientists pursue a dazzling array of goals, scientific and otherwise, been assimilated into lay-notions of science.
Science without its goals
My recommendation is that in our ontology of science the notion of the goals of science should be replaced with the broader notion of the goals of individual scientists or their communities. By this I refer not to the goals individual scientists or their communities may have qua scientists or scientific communities, but to whatever goals scientists or their communities happen to have, without regard to what we might recognize as a scientific goal. This recommended move from goals of science to
Acknowledgements
This paper benefited from the advice and comments of Pat Croskery, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, an audience at the University of Pittsburgh, and anonymous referees for Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
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Nature of Science and Nature of Scientists: Implications for University Education in the Natural Sciences
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