The Importance Of Neutrality In Science

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Neutrality can be defined as “the state of not supporting or helping either side in a conflict, impartiality”. The idea of a neutral question and the obvious interpretation of a neutral question is that the questioner has no vested interest in the answer; it is essentially a detached, impersonal, open question. Neutrality can be analyzed within areas of knowledge such as natural sciences and human sciences and further explored for the contrast between these areas with the ethics systems and morality. Moral and ethical neutrality is a broad lens at which natural and human sciences can be examined as I feel it is the foundation of all forms of human behavior and judgment. When wondering if it is possible to reach a position of impartiality, …show more content…

One of the most prominent aspects of neutrality that exists within natural sciences is the idea of logical neutrality and it’s role in aspects of this field such as the scientific method. We can ask ourselves is it possible to pose a neutral question with regards to the scientific method as an aspect of natural sciences? Much of science in general but specifically natural sciences is based off of reason, when there is something to be discovered scientists must use reason to determine a way to reach that goal of discovery. Scientists design experiments and strive to obtain results confirming or disproving a hypothesis, but what are the factors that determine the validity of scientific …show more content…

Evolution News states in a post entitled “The Myth of Science 's Neutrality” that “the scientific method is not a machine that guarantees, "Input data; output knowledge." Science is always mediated by fallible humans with imperfect knowledge, prone to selfish interests.” ‘Bad science’ however as we have learned throughout the TOK course consists of sciences that when explored, rely on bias and agenda-driven purposes, certain natural sciences such as pathological science, and junk science are considered ‘bad’ purely based on their lack of neutrality. This contradicts the concept brought up earlier that it could be possible that some scientific research lacking neutrality isn’t unreliable or bad. For a science to be considered legitimate we can consider Karl Popper’s theory of falsifiability, which outlines neutrality as the product of a falsifiable process. Karl Popper’s theory of falsifiability, in brief, states that a theory cannot be considered valid without the ability to be disproven, therefore when considering neutrality in this equation it makes sense that it would be the outcome of such a neutral, open ended

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