A defining moment in the history of science occurred when experimenters, who previously had kept their findings secret, began to publish their results, making their findings available for critical peer review, and opening the door for collaborative contribution. Through this process, scientific researchers had their work confirmed, challenged, or contributed to and taken further in a significant way. For example, with the publication of “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543, Polish mathematician, and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus presented his heliocentric model of the solar system. Based upon observational evidence and a comprehensive mathematical framework, his work was verified and expanded upon by numerous others including German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei, and, eventually by English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton.
Newton’s work had a consequential impact facilitating key breakthroughs in numerous areas of modern life including sea navigation, the development of the locomotive, the steamship and railroad design facilitating global trade. Newtonian thinking also had a strong influence on James Watt whose innovations to the steam engine fueled the industrial revolution. Although the industrial revolution brought new problems such as pollution and the exploitation of labor it also brought many benefits. For average people the industrial revolution enabled a transformation of daily life featuring affordable goods and commodities, the emergence of the middle class, widespread upward socio-economic mobility and a world of continuous technological innovation.
In science the process of having one’s work confirmed or disproven by another researcher or group is called objective verifiability — probably the most effective bias defeating mechanism of all. Objective verification can be applied when what is being studied involves measurable, observable, or reproducible evidence, which exists regardless of individual or collective beliefs and biases. For example — verifying the boiling point of water at sea level through repeated experiments.
In Naturalistic Support where people are the focus, we gain useful insight through intersubjective verification. Rather than involving universal truths that exist independent of human agreement, intersubjective verification involves shared agreements, understandings, or consensus among a group. In Naturalistic Support this involves having our experiences reflected back to us and reacted to by our peers. Both the scientific enterprise and Naturalistic Support are open sourced endeavors in which outside verification is a key source of valuable information.
The term open-sourced refers to a type of software, project, or initiative whose source code, design, or data is made freely available for others to view, modify, and distribute. Separated from concerns of profit, the most essential feature of the scientific method, is that it is an open sourced enterprise. Although the term originated with the open source software movement it has since expanded to other areas, such as education, and science. Becoming open sourced is also an important component of Naturalistic Support where, in order to gain a more accurate and deeper understanding, we share our thoughts and feelings with our peers and the more we share, the more effective, and satisfying our journey becomes.