Scientific Method What Is Ockham's Term Paper

Many people might be casual users of marijuana and not use hard drugs, thus the research must be structured to see if causality as well as correlation is established between hard drug use and using marijuana beforehand.

What do you think about the argument raised in the "Are scientists wearing blinkers?" section of the Web page? How does this idea tie into you chapter's discussion of neutrality and politics in research?

Far from being blinkered, Josh Wudka states that most scientists are actually very willing to entertain unusual theories. He advances the concept that scientists would love to prove everyone else before them wrong, and become the new media darling who wins the next Nobel Prize. However, in the past, virtually every intellectual revolution in science has been quite hard-won, which the website acknowledges in its discussion of Galileo and Copernicus. Furthermore, biases do exist in science -- a scientist paid to research side effects in a new pharmaceutical when the fortunes of a company hinge upon its FDA approval may not apply the same rigor to his or her analysis as a scientist from an independent authority.Political influences can also have an unfortunate impact upon scientific objectivity. For example, when first entertaining the possibility that the universe did not revolve around the earth, there was political resistance from the powerful Catholic Church because this contradicted the official dogma of the time. Today, Darwinian theories of evolution are disputed because they are seen as contradictory to fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible, and although creationist science has little basis in fact, there have been movements to fund it or teach it in school to give 'equal time' to this poorly substantiated theory.

Works Cited

Wudka, Jose. (1998). "Scientific Method." Retrieved 24 Sept 2007 at http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node5.html.....