Socio-constructive Science&Technology I

Today, I held 2nd time master course class. In this class, we discuss what scientific knowledge is. Today, we continued to argue some instances on scientific knowledge from las week. Last week, we took up Dr. Ichikawa's discovery and Dr. Millikan's experiment. The former is on inducing cancer artificially in 1915. In this research theme, Dr. Fibiger in Denmark received Norvel Prize in 1926 by proving the relation between parasites and tumors in 1907. However, the later days his discovery was proved to be wrong, and Dr. Ichikawa's was right. In those days, Fibiger was already an authority of pathological anatomy, on the contrary Ichikawa was a novice scientist. Furthermore, some of the Novel Prize Selection committee had discrimination against un-European people. Based on this instance, we discussed on justice of scientific knowledge. On the other side, Millikan discovered the charge on a single electron by oil dropping experience. However, he reported 58 data out of 170, which suited his prediction. On this example we argued what a scientific experiment is. Then today we adopted robotomy and the theory how an airplane can fly. Lobotomy is a neurosurgical procedure for separating the prefrontal lobe from the anterior lobes. Although this operation had conducted to treat sever mental illnesses, there were sever side effects. In spite of these effects, Dr. Monis who was the pioneer of this procedure was given the Nobel Prize in 1949. We discussed the difficulties on experiments of human. Next we examined the difference between science and technology based on the fact that the flight theory have not uncleared yet. Today's last theme was the idea of logical positivism, which is an idea for definition of scientific knowledge, that is, a scientific knowledge is created by induction from some observable phenomena. We considered the problems of this idea.