Welcome to all the teachers and students gathered here. All of us have studied science. Science is one of the most fundamental subjects needs for us to be able to become well informed individuals.
The application of science is manifold and comes in handy in many situations that we face on a daily basis. Now what if I said that science does not mean the subject science? That is going to be the central idea of my speech today.
A science can be understood as a body of knowledge that has been developed using acceptable methods of scientific inquiry. This definition would seem very difficult to understand and so I will break it down further. A science is any subject or discipline. It can be mathematics or social science or geography or any other subject. To qualify as science a subject should have a body of knowledge or information that is considered to be that of that subject. This would include the theories and classifications and all other works that come under the subject matter will be the knowledge. However, this knowledge should also be collected in a particular way. Scientific enquiry refers to a research process where the information or theory that is developed in an objective manner, in the sense that the results will be the same irrespective of who does the research.
Based on the parameters stated above, it is very clear that mathematics is the purest of sciences and subjects like physics, chemistry and biology also qualify as science. The debate becomes important when it comes to subjects like psychology and sociology that study things that are very varied. For instance, human emotions cannot be explained in an objective manner because they change and the way we feel differs from person to person. But these subjects also qualify as science because they have been able to use scientific inquiry to produce a system of knowledge.
In this speech, I have made an attempt to introduce a highly complex idea of what a science is. Understanding this notion can be highly abstract and difficult for many of us but it is important to have this broad idea clear early on so that we can develop a holistic perspective about knowledge and disciples.