What it means to “explain” something in science often comes down to the application of mathematics. Some thinkers hold that mathematics is a kind of language—a systematic contrivance of signs, the criteria for the authority of which are internal coherence, elegance, and depth. The application of such a highly artificial system to as other language does, to accurately describe the functioning of some aspect of the world.
At the center of the issue of scientific knowledge can thus be found questions about the relationship between language and what it refers to. A discussion about the role played by language in the pursuit of knowledge has been going on among linguists for several decades. The debate centers around whether language things is purely a matter of agreed-upon conventions, making knowledge tenuous, relative, and inexact.
Lately the latter theory has been gaining wider acceptance. According to linguists who support this theory, the way language is used varies depending upon changes in accepted practices and theories among those who work in a particular discipline. These linguists argue that, in the pursuit of knowledge, a statement is true only process in question, to be held as true until another, more compelling analogy takes its place.
In pursuing the implications of this theory, linguists have reached the point at which they must ask: If words or sentences do not correspond in an essential way to life or to our ideas about life, then just what are they capable of telling us about the world? In science and mathematics, acquisition of scientific knowledge? But this question has yet to be significantly addressed in the sciences.
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Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.
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Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.
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Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.
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