Chapter Summary

Science seeks knowledge and understanding of reality, and it does so through the formulation, testing, and evaluation of theories. Science is a way of searching for truth. Technology, though, is the production of products. Science is not a worldview, and we can't identify it with a particular ideology. A particular worldview may predominate in the scientific community, but this doesn't mean that the worldview is what science is all about. Science is not scientism—it is not the only way to acquire knowledge. It is, however, our most reliable way of acquiring knowledge of empirical facts.

The scientific method cannot be identified with any particular set of experimental or observational procedures. But it does involve several general steps:

1. identifying the problem,
2. devising a hypothesis,
3. deriving a test implication,
4. performing the test, and
5. accepting or rejecting the hypothesis.

This kind of theory-testing is part of a broader effort to evaluate a theory against its competitors. This kind of evaluation always involves, implicitly or explicitly, the criteria of adequacy.

Inference to the best explanation can be used to assess weird theories as well as more commonplace explanations in science and everyday life. However, when people try to evaluate extraordinary theories, they often make certain typical mistakes. They may believe that because they can't think of a natural explanation, a paranormal explanation must be correct. They may mistake what seems for what is, forgetting that we shouldn't accept the evidence provided by personal experience if we have good reason to doubt it. And they may not fully understand the concepts of logical and physical possibility. In both science and everyday life, the TEST formula enables us to fairly appraise the worth of all sorts of weird theories, including those about crop circles and communication with the dead, the two cases we examine in this chapter.