It is now week 3 of U.W.I and classes are starting to get hectic; all 5 course assignments are due in the
same week with each one requiring multiple days of work, effort and editing to produce decent quality
material to be submitted/presented and critiqued harshly for a tiny percentage of my final grade.
Nevertheless, this week’s lecture targeted observations, experimentation, theories and models. Before I
could understand scientific models and how they are achieved I was shown the methods that past
philosophers used to gain scientific knowledge to generate conclusions. Two main philosophers were
mentioned, Plato, whom I have heard of before, and Aristotle, whom I have not, both having two very
different approaches and beliefs. The former, insisting that scientific knowledge can be obtained by
rationalism; by using our knowledge of how the world works, we can understand how something works.
I’m no scientist, but this approach seems to not make sense to me since humans do not possess all the
knowledge in the world in the first place so how can they use rationalism to explain how something that
they have no knowledge of works? Aristotle however, firmly believed that knowledge could only be
gained by generating evidence to build upon what is already known. Nowadays, the more predominant
method to gain scientific knowledge is by observation and experimentation which will generate a
scientific theory.
Beliefs without the support of observational data do not form part of science (Mckenzie, 2003, p. 72).
Observation, in my own words, entails recording how a subject/object being studied behaves either
presently or over a period of time. Since my first lecture I have been observing a lot of things around me
such as on Tuesdays, there is more traffic at 8 a.m. rather than at 7 a.m. in Piarco. I always thought that in
science, quantitative observation would be the only accepted method of observation so it came as a
surprise to me that both quantitative and qualitative observation is welcomed however quantitative is a
little more favored which is to be expected.
It was quite shocking to me that the lecturer had to explain that there is a difference between observation
and experimentation, I thought that it was obvious but, I guess persons doing this course really disliked
science in school. Merriam-Webster (n.d.), defines experimentation as an operation or procedure carried
