Chapter 1 From Science to Data | Data Analysis in R

If you are a scientist or scientist in training, have you ever stopped and asked yourself what is science? Or what is not science? And if you know what science is, do you think about What defines good or bad science? These are large, philosophical questions that won’t be answered in this text, but there is still value in thinking about them and returning to the fundamentals of what constitutes science and how we best conduct science. Figure 1.1: Source: XKCD While many deep and philosophical answers exist to the question of what is science, one very practical answer is that science is culture’s answer to epistemology. If you are now wondering what epistemology is, epistemology is just a term that refers to the theory of knowledge; in other words, how we know things. So science is one way that societies and cultures generate knowledge and information about the material reality. Following this idea, we might think of science as an objective message about the nature of reality. This is tr

If you are a scientist or scientist in training, have you ever stopped and asked yourself what is science? Or what is not science? And if you know what science is, do you think about What defines good or bad science? These are large, philosophical questions that won’t be answered in this text, but there is still value in thinking about them and returning to the fundamentals of what constitutes science and how we best conduct science. Figure 1.1: Source: XKCD While many deep and philosophical answers exist to the question of what is science, one very practical answer is that science is culture’