The best-laid schemes of mice and men // Go oft awry, // And leave us nothing but grief and pain, // For promised joy! – Robert Burns (1785) The purpose of human existence can range from fulfilling God's commandments in Abrahamic religions to living an absurd life in a meaningless world with nothing to discover. The role of science is thus deeply entangled with the role we attribute to ourselves. While both extremes do not encourage any exploration of Nature, we have pragmatically developed best-laid schemes to analyse and investigate natural processes in order to explain and predict their behaviour and use it to our advantage. In this essay, I will show that these best-laid schemes often amount to creating a detailed image based on our expectations. Then trying to find counterexamples or supportive evidence for such sophisticated models is considered knowledge gain. Yet, too frequently, Nature ploughs up our promising guesses and lets many an idea go awry. Instead of paving our path to understanding with trial-and-error failures and disappointments, I propose to walk a more motivating and constructive way. This ``science of senses” builds upon an explicit separation between observational sensing and increasingly detailed assumptions to make sense of acquired data. In this approach, a hierarchy of models is set up such that existing data provide the evidence on which the fundamental models are completely based. Beyond this secured knowledge, higher-level speculative models fill the gaps in the uncharted territory not yet explored with data points. The random walk to favour or refute specific complex models is thus replaced by the pleasure of efficiently and incrementally finding more things out. Failure to predict or explain new data can only happen at the highest modelling levels and building upon data-based knowledge, remaining open questions are also clearly set out.
Jenny Wagner
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