A New Way of Thinking about Science

Like I mentioned in class, I am both a CSCL major and premed, so my entire school career has been an odd, yet balancing, mix of humanities and science. The issue was that I had no concise way to bring the two together. I most other CSCL classes we've stuck to what you'd expect from a course that teaches about culture; literature, the media, tv, movies, music, sexuality, ect. But I hadn't come across a way to really fit what I've learned from being a CSCL major into my science classes.

I had previously thought of the sciences as most people do, as being pure and mostly unaffected by society. In biology and psychology I could see some of the outside influences but in my mind the harder sciences, like physics or chemistry, were pretty much solid. Regardless of where (or when) you live the acceleration on a falling object from gravity on Earth is always 9.81 m/s^2 and water will always consist of two Hydrogens and an Oxygen molecule.

What I can see know is that while these facts were always part of reality, before people had a way of "seeing" them these facts could not have been true. Before Newton was able to derive the equation for the force of gravity it could not have been true that the acceleration is always 9.81 m/s^2. You need a fact before you can say its true or not. According to Aristotle the truth of the matter was that the "nature" of the objects decided whether or not they rose or fell. Somethings fell because their natural position was in the center of the universe (which was the Earth at the time) and so they'd move downwards. While we know now that this is not reality and, for us, is wrong, in the 4th century BC Aristotle was correct. Facts are just what the majority of the people, those with authority, at least, consider to be correct, even if it turns out to be contradictory to the reality. Society creates truth.

I take from this class a heightened sense of skepticism about the world around me. I can see more clearly that many of the things I consider true or factual may be incorrect in reality. I am comfortable with this, however. I feel that a good amount of doubt is healthy, for scientists just as much as, if not more than, anyone else. If no one bothered to question the reality of an established fact we would not have seen any of the progression that has brought society to where it is today.