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The importance of
observation in the
empirical nature
of Science

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What does observation mean in
Science?
That's what it means to observe during a scientific experiment. It
means to notice what's going on through your senses, but, more
specifically, we can define observation as the act of knowing and
recording something. This has to do with both the act of knowing
what's going on, and then recording what happened.
What does empirical nature of science mean?

The empirical nature of science – refers to the idea that

science is based on or derived from observations of the world
around us from which interpretations are made. A scientific
explanation must be consistent with empirical evidence.
Empirical evidence is the evidence that we directly observe and
get from our senses. This might be contrasted to philosophical
or theoretical reasoning, which can be done without any direct
observation of ‘real life’.
Empirical evidence is related to the philosophical distinction
between a priori and a posteriori reasoning. A priori reasoning,
that is, without (or ‘prior’ to) evidence or experience is the sort
of reasoning commonly used by logicians, philosophers, and
mathematicians. a posteriori reasoning is based on observation
and empirical evidence.
 Example of Empirical Evidence
In science
Let’s look at an empirical evidence example from the healthcare industry. Imagine that you are a
doctor and that you are interested in lowering blood pressure to reduce the probability of having a
heart attack. You hear about a new drug called atenolol that slows down the heart and reduces
blood pressure. You use a priori reasoning to create a hypothesis that this drug might reduce the
risk of a heart attack because it lowers blood pressure. But in this scenario, you don’t just rely on a
priori reasoning. You want to obtain empirical evidence for your hypothesis.
So, you run a large randomized drug trial. You give a sugar-pill placebo to some people and atenolol
to the others. It turns out that the drug indeed reduces the blood pressure of people who take it.
Now you have empirical evidence that atenolol reduces blood pressure, but what about the risk of a
heart attack? When you analyze the dataset, you see that it doesn’t reduce mortality by as much as
other drugs that have a similar effect on blood pressure. So, your priori reasoning that this drug
would reduce the risk of a heart attack by lowering blood pressure was invalidated by a posteriori
empirical evidence.
What is the importance of
observation in research?
Observation is particularly useful for understanding how or why
something occurs within a natural setting and can be a particularly
effective data collection approach when self-reported information
(what people say) is likely to be different from actual information
(what people really do) (Savin-Baden and Howell Major, 2013, p. 392).
ACTIVITY TIME