The scientific method has become the dominant approach to how we understand the world around us. Using principles such as empirical observation and repeatable results, science presents us with a discourse that endeavors to make sense of our existence. At the same time, however, is science the only means by which to understand our lives? Although the results of scientific research have unquestionably been beneficial to humanity, providing the impetus behind many of our civilizational advances, science is also one singular approach to understanding and knowledge. Science has its own particular methodologies and interests; furthermore, science has not always been the most dominant way of understanding the world around us, a role which historically has often been conferred to religion. Accordingly, to accept the clear powers and successes of scientific explanation does not mean that we should necessarily exclude other ways of looking at the world, precisely because of the way in which science is only itself a particular way of looking at the world, and therefore, also limited.
One clear example of science’s power and limitations is that of brain research. Scientific explanation allows us to understand with more accuracy potential causes of phenomena such as mental illness. How the brain works on anatomical, physiological and chemical levels, it is believed, can perhaps explain the reasons for disorders such as depression. Science has contributed immensely to this treatment, providing various pharmaceutical solutions to such disorders. However, at the same time, despite the link on some levels between mental disorders and brain activity, the prejudices of the scientific method means that it cannot consider other reasons for depression, such as sociological relations. The very nature of the scientific method means that it will reduce mental disorders to a material phenomena, no different than the reaction between atoms. This, however, is itself a limit, a limit in regard to how human beings themselves react to each other on a social level. The scientific method, although beneficial, in this case also performs a type of reductionism, whereby it overlooks other potential causes for such disorders which cannot be reduced to such a simplistic cause and effect model.
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"The Powers and Limits of Science".
This brings to mind the limitations of science in relation to our lives as human beings in general. For example, science can tell us much about various phenomena such as pollution. It can tell us that our society is creating an ecological catastrophe. But science at the same time cannot give us any solutions as to potential alternative arrangements of society, because this is outside the scope of its reasoning. Science is premised on observation of phenomena, and in this way it is always about the past instead of the future: it cannot tell us about forms of life and human existence that could exist, ways in which we could arrange our societies to avert the ecological catastrophes that science helps us discern at the outset.
This is clearly the most significant limitation of science: the question of our roles as human beings and our relation to the world. The scientific method has radically revised some of our oldest prejudices, displacing the earth from the center of the universe and thereby calling into question some anthropocentric viewpoints. At the same time, science cannot tell us about our deepest personal questions on a satisfactory level: who are we, and why we are here. These can only be answered from science according to its own limited perspective and therefore fails to address our fundamental concerns about our ethics and existence.
No one can deny the radical contributions science has made to the growth of human knowledge. The expansiveness of this contribution, however, does not mean that science is the only means by which to contribute to knowledge. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact in which science opens up questions, such as our the meaning of our basic humanity and what we as a species should do, which science itself cannot answer.
