THE RISE OF EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE

The rise of experimental science in the nineteenth century initiated a shift away from a process whereby discoveries were fitted into existing views of nature and toward a development of new concepts and theories (Wolpert, 1992, pp. ix-xiv). Mendel's work in the 1860s on inheritance factors led to the development of the science of genetics. The work of Lavoisier broke chemistry free of its associations with alchemy, and placed on the path to become a physical science. Some medical scientists began to explore the human mind, an area of inquiry that led to the development of the social science of psychology.

The rise of experimental science firmly established four objectives for all scientific inquiry--description, prediction, control, and understanding (von Bertalanffy, 2967, pp. 61-65). The least demanding of these objectives is the description of reality in an understandable way. Prediction involves both the observation and description of behavior. The development of answers to questions concerning the causes and consequences of behavior led to the fram

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n a system. When a proposition is formulated for empirical testing a hypothesis is created (McMahon, 1994, pp. 32-33). Hypotheses are declarative statements that are both tentative and conjectural in character. Hypotheses may be both descriptive and relational in form. Propositions are statements proposing an explanation for a phenomenon, while hypotheses are used to test propositions. While hypotheses may be derived from observed facts, they may also be deduced from theory. In scientific inquiry, theory provides a basis for the narrowing of the body of facts that must be studied to investigate a problem. Theory also suggests the most productive approaches to the investigation of a problem. Lastly, theory summarizes what is already known about a problem. A principal role of ethics in the conduct of research is to assure truth is the ultimate objective, as opposed skewing to conduct of an investigation toward a directed finding (Barzun and Graff, 1977, p. 49). An equally important role played by ethics in scientific inquiry is the preservation of the privacy and the integrity of human subjects involved in such research. An important ethical consideration in the conduct of scholarly inquiry, thus, involves the structure
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