‘The Ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly test and retest each others results’ – To What extent would you agree with this claim in the natural and human sciences.

Human beings are inherently flawed creatures. Through faults in reason and sense perception we interpret the world not as it truly is. Both the Human and Natural Sciences are tools to understand the world and are a lens in which to comprehend ideas not readily available to us purely through common sense logic and sense perception. The implications made in the title are that the inductive scientific method, when removed from error and bias, provides unequivocal and unobjectionable objective truth. The …show more content…
The fallibility of an individual’s perception as well as the collective perception of the scientific community has led philosophers and thinkers such as Hilary Lawson to argue against the objectivity of science. Lawson himself quotes David Bohm – “Facts depend on theories, they depend on concepts, they depend on schemata of thought’. Both Bohm and Lawson are sceptically implying that the scientific community looks for beliefs and knowledge that conforms, not only, with our perception of reality but our attempts to organise all events into a perfect and all encompassing universal theory. To again quote Karl Popper ‘a theory that explains everything, explains nothing.’ Whilst I personally strongly disagree with Lawson and Bohm’s assertion that science is trying to force all scientific theory into a lattice of all encompassing knowledge, there is an element of validity in their argument. Although their attempts to debase the scientific method or science does not attack any real flaw in the scientific method, it simply assumes that science cannot comprehend all situations at all times everywhere, which is to an extent justified due to problems with the certainty of the inductive method of reasoning.