What are the most basic assumptions one has to make in order to conduct science?

Question

I often wondered: What are the most basic assumptions I have to make before I can even start thinking about life, universe and the rest?

So far I have boiled them down to three:

1. There is a world, a reality.
2. I am part of this world.
3. My senses provide me with a not entirely wrong, arbitrary yet mostly consistent, representation of reality.

Everything else should follow from those three.

My question now is: Are these three really all the assumption everyone must make before one can conduct science? Have I omitted something else?

For example, must I assume that if I do the one thing (e.g. let a rock fall) that this will be repeatable, or is the fact that it is repeatable already an insight into reality?

Answer 1

The core of the scientific method is to have an observer, something to observe, a mechanism for generating and evaluating predictions about future observations, and a way to either select similar future observations or generate new similar events to observe. You then observe, model, test, observe, model, test, etc., as a way of improving your predictor's performance.

The constraints are therefore extraordinarily weak, though not exactly the ones you describe. Conditions need to be temporally stable enough so that you can run your observe-model-test loop many times before the rules completely change (slow drift in rules is okay, if you know to expect it); outcomes need to be sufficiently reproducible so that there is something to predict (but broad distributions are okay). Both randomness and extreme complexity can frustrate reproducibility; the more sophisticated of an observer/modeler you are, the more complexity you'll be able to tackle.

Vastly stronger than the constraints on the rest of the world are the constraints on the observer and modeler (possibly the same entity, though there is no reason it needs to be; the observer can use a modeler-oracle). Between the pair of them they need to be able to translate events into a representation of those events, detect which differences are purely stochastic and which are regular, and devise some sort of compact representation of such things that can be used to make future predictions. This is an immense amount of computational work, and it seems unlikely that in a badly chaotic time-varying universe that such entities could exist.

So the answer is probably very close to: if you exist and have adequate capacities to attempt to follow the scientific method, you can probably use it to find out at least some things.

Answer 2

I think requiring too much to to "start" conducting science would be too restrictive and even dogmatic, which science, by its very nature, tries to avoid. Assuming that what is asked is not what really distinguishes scientific practice from others (say, from philosphy), then we can really have very loose starting assumptions:

I need no more than "I" myself with the ability to use a capable language to help myself "understand" and build on.

All the rest would be arbitrary restrictions:

• Why would you necessarily separate things as "I" and the rest? How can be so certain about sepration or independece? How does it help us to start doing science?
• If there is such thing as reality, remember that, it will be covered (hopefully exhaustively, we don't know yet) as a subject matter of the scientific practice when I start to conduct it. I am not saying that reality, whatever it is, should be the sole interest of the science. But it will certainly be one of them. During the practice, I need the freedom to redefine reality (or any other concept) or drop it at all during the course of the practice.
• Certain required attributes of "I" who will conduct science: Many of them, including the one particularly mentioned can be dropped as well. Do I really nead senses enabling a consistent respresentation of the reality? I think not as I beleive that I still have the chance to cope with, say, inconsitency. If to require a constraint or attribute on "I", i would choose freedom only. Being capable of conducting science does not count as a requirement in my opinion. However, ability to use a language, understand and develop/build-on imply certain attributes that "I" has to have. All this things suggest to me that we should focus on the qualifications and abilities of "I" so that "I" can conduct science.

Note that, many other practices other than science would require as much or the same set of basic assumptions as science does. Is this a problem? We are interested in starting point-only with this question... What separate science from non-science is a totally different question.

Answer 3

The assumptions that you start with shape the future of your thought. Different assumptions different futures. There isn't a neccessary single starting point.

Your headline question talks about Science. In Greek antiquity science was done by natural philosophers. They didn't use the modern scientific method but at least supposed that the world was objective and rationally explicable as per your assumptions.

When in the body of your question you say how to comprehend 'life, universe and the rest'. It is clear that you think that the scientific method is the only way to go. But plenty of philosophers have disputed this whether theologically inspired (Buddhist & Islamic Philosophy) or rationally inspired, for example the phyrronic skeptics.

Answer 4

I have been reading the answers and have gotten VERY confused. This conversation clearly beyond me, but I do have know one assumption necessary for empirical science.

A coin if flipped n times, with the coin always landing on heads. The chance of this happening with an unbalanced coin is 1. However, the chance of this happening with a balanced coin is 1/(2^n). No matter how large n is, the chance that this coin is balance will never reach 0. Therefor, before an experiment can be preformed, an assumption must be made that probabilities lower than a certain level are considered impossible.

As I am reading this over, I am starting to wonder whether this is needed for science or if this is only needed for something to be proven by science. Either way, it is something you should consider.