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In two blog entries (one and two) Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel discusses the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking.

First, here’s the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:

Believing something doesn’t make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned with what a person believes about the world but instead with what one can establish about the world, usually on the basis of empirical evidence.

The second drawing is based on the late Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper didn’t see the problem of induction — that inductive inferences drawn from limited data could go wrong — as something that could be “solved”. However, he thought that the methodology of science avoided the problem by not identifying conclusions arrived at through inductive inference as “knowledge” in the strong sense of “there is no way this could fail to be true”. Here’s Popper’s picture of the process of building scientific knowledge:

Notice that Popper doesn’t think it matters all that much where your hypothesis P comes from. Maybe it comes from lots of poking around and observing your phenomena. Maybe it comes from that recurring nightmare of the snake biting his own tail. It’s not important. The thing that can make P a respectable scientific claim is that it is tested in the right kind of way.

In an earlier discussion of Popper, Stemwedel wrote:

The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

No wonder some politicians are at war with science. A big bag of hot air might not carry you very high if you keep looking for ways to poke holes in it.