What is Science?

Here is a definition of science I came up with last week end while reading Popper.

Science is a process by which humans transcript and corrobore their understanding of the world in the form of universal statements.

A scientific methodology describes precisely this process for a particular type of phenomena.

The development cycle is part of a scientific methodology with human usages as studied phenomena.

There is No Pure Inductive Methodology.

Speaking with a friend of mine, Cyril, we understood that there is no pure inductive logic in Science. Every scientist follows a hypothetic-deductive methodology, even if he does not know it. An empirical investigation might inductively give rise to scientific propositions. These propositions were already known to the scientist unconsciously or if you prefer not to go into psychology, by intuition. One shouldn’t refuse his intuitions, but follow them and express them. Inductive logic refuses intuitions, it appears irrecevable as it has no empirical basis. It is intuition which pushes the empirical scientist to investigates a specific type of phenomenon.

The Software Development Cycle is a Scientific Cycle

The following diagram shows that the software development cycle is equivalent in the form to the science cycle.

Observations are the best we can do.

I started to read ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ by Karl Popper, and reading the preface, which was already quite exciting, one paragraph stucked me :

“Thus the method of constructing artificial model languages is incapable of tackling the problems of the growth of knowledge; and it is even less able to do so than the method of analysing ordinary languages. It is a result of their poverty that they yield only the most crude and the most misleading model of the growth of knowledge– the model of an accumulating heap of observation statements.“

Karl Popper, The logic of Scientific Discovery, Preface, 1959.

If observations is the best we can do, even if it is not really good for Karl Popper to study epistemology, then we should do it the best we can. In the previous post I described my view of the collaborative tagging system as a heap of observations. It makes me feel we are on the right way.

The Collaborative Tagging System Abstractions

This diagram presents the abstractions involved in the collaborative tagging system, this is more described in a paper that we just submitted to the SAAW06 workshop. In this paper we also give specifications of the collaborative tagging system and of the collaborative tagging memory. Hopefully it will get accepted…

Here is a set of definitions from the oxford dictionary of the terms used in the diagram:

• Phenomenon: The object of a person’s perception; what the senses or the mind notice.
• Observation: The action or process of observing something or someone carefully or in order to gain information.
• Representation: A mental state or concept regarded as corresponding to a thing perceived.
• Transcription: A written or printed representation of something.
• Term: A word or phrase used to describe a thing or to express a concept, esp. in a particular kind of language or branch of study.
• Human: A human being, esp. a person as distinguished from an animal or (in science fiction) an alien.
• Object: A thing external to the thinking mind or subject.
• Collaborative: produced or conducted by two or more parties working together.
• Tagging: attach a label to.
• Memory: Something remembered from the past.

The phenomena are the environment of the system. Observations are the human perceptions of the phenomenon. The representations are the mental association of terms to the observations. The transcription is the process of writing the observations, what we call tag. The collaborative tagging memory stores observations.