The Experience of Science

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiv

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2. What Is Science?

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 1-6

3. Facts

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 7-19

4. Logic

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 21-28

5. Snow on Cholera

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 29-71

6. Mathematics

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 73-91

7. Is Heat a Substance?

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 93-145

8. Probability

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 147-181

9. What Is Madness?

   • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

   Pages 183-262

10. Statistics

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 263-278

11. Science-The Search for Understanding

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 279-285

12. Science-The Goal of Generality

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 287-292

13. Science-The Experimental Test

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 293-316

14. The Experimenter and the Experiment

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 317-325

15. Measurement and Its Pitfalls

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 327-341

16. Graphs and Sketches

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 343-359

17. Where Do Hypotheses Come From?

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 361-370

18. The Dispassionate Scientist

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 371-376

19. The Cultural Roots of Science

    • Martin Goldstein, Inge Goldstein

    Pages 377-390

20. Back Matter

    Pages 391-400

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Our earlier book, How We Know: An Exploration of the Scientific Process, was written to give some conception of what the scientific approach is like, how to recognize it, how to distinguish it from other approaches to understanding the world, and to give some feeling for the intellectual excitement and aesthetic satisfactions of science. These goals represented our concept of the term "scientific literacy." Though the book was written for the general reader, to our surprise and gratification it was also used as a text in about forty colleges, and some high schools, for courses in science for the non-scientist, in methodology of science for social and behavioral sciences, and in the philosophy of science. As a result we were encouraged to write a textbook with essentially the same purpose and basic approach, but at a level appropriate to college students. We have drawn up problems for those chapters that would benefit from them, described laboratory experiments that illustrate important points discussed in the text, and made suggestions for additional readings, term papers, and other projects. Throughout the book we have introduced a number of chapters and appendices that provide examples of the uses of quantitative thinking in the sciences: logic, math­ ematics, probability, statistics, and graphical representation.

• behavior
• experiment
• logic
• mathematics
• philosophy

• Yeshiva University, New York, USA

  Martin Goldstein

• Columbia University, New York, USA

  Inge Goldstein

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