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¹ Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas

Within scientific speeches, especially those by science students, expressions that synonymize the terms see and observe are frequent. That would imply that a blind person would be unable to make observations, a mistake that is made when trying to emphasize that something is being watched closely or inspected with certain intention, hence, observing. However, the term observation, does not derive etymologically from visual perception but from conserve, which in turn derives from servare, as observare, meaning: to look out, guard, save. Moreover, besides comprising other forms of perception such as hearing, smell, touch, observing in scientific (epistemological) terms consists rather of an inferential process coupled to the perception, that remarks or highlights something, i.e., a relation, a pattern, a constancy, a regularity, or a tendency, etc., detected in data or while inspecteing a phenomenom. In this way, observation in the sense of an element of Scientific Method implies a logical action that recognizes, within a heuristic process, that something is missing in the available theory (research problem), or that indicates evidence for or against theoretical premises or hypotheses. The ambigüity in the use of the term observe has an inertia that permeates even the speech of science philosophers. However, to science students it represents an ethical challenge to identify and correct this type of ambigüities during their scientific endeavour which can be better approached with an adequate philosophical background.

Palabras clave: Deduction, Induction, Inference, Perception, Scientific Method

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