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The natural sciences, Making connections to the core theme, The Natural…
The natural sciences
Perspective
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• In what ways have influential individuals contributed to the development of the natural sciences as an area of knowledge?
• Does the precision of the language used in the natural sciences successfully eliminate all ambiguity?
• Does the list of disciplines included in, or excluded from, the natural sciences change from one era to another, or from one culture or tradition to another?
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Scope
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• Should the natural sciences be regarded as a body of knowledge, a system of knowledge or a method?
• Could there be scientific problems that are currently unknown because the technology needed to reveal them doesn’t exist yet?
• Is human knowledge confined to what the natural sciences discover, or are there other important inquiries that are not covered by the natural sciences?
• What knowledge, if any, is likely to always remain beyond the capabilities of science to investigate or verify?
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• How might developments in scientific knowledge trigger political controversies or controversies in other areas of knowledge?
Methods and tools
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• What is the role of imagination and intuition in the creation of hypotheses in the natural sciences?
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• What is the role of inductive and deductive reasoning in scientific inquiry, prediction and explanation?
• Does scientific language have a primarily descriptive, explanatory or interpretative function?
ethics
• Is science, or should it be, value-free?
• Should scientific research be subject to ethical constraints or is the pursuit of all scientific knowledge intrinsically worthwhile?
• Do we tend to exaggerate the objectivity of scientific facts and the subjectivity of moral values?
• In what ways have developments in science challenged long-held ethical values? Can moral disagreements be resolved with reference to empirical evidence?
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