Opinion #7: What is a major benefit of doing research for society?

opinion
philosophy of science
Author
Affiliation

York University

Published

July 31, 2026

A major function of science is not to obtain a book of truths per-se, but rather to adjust a community’s psychological relationship with reality, such that we are better able to understand it. (Wherein understanding is generally meant to refer to our causal and predictive abilities.)

To give an example of this opinion, I think what’s important about research in the chemical sciences is not so much the chemistry textbooks, but rather the entire community of people that organizes itself around the ideas of how chemistry works and can be studied. Indeed, textbooks are typically just an incomplete summary of the community’s understanding.