what is science?

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Anyone here interested in philosophy of science?
1) what is science? Does it have to be useful, true or valid? To what extent can science be true/valid/useful?
2) how can we differentiate science from pseudoscience and non-scientific knowledge? To what extent is non-scientific knowledge valid/true/useful?
3) any thoughts on Kuhn, Popper etc?

It's all here: Rational Wiki Article on Science.

In my eyes, science is the questioning /research/ exploration/hypothesizing/ study of x.

Science is great if you want to be a chemist, or build a house or something. However, there are some things where science cannot go. There is no science for god, dreams, illusion, hallucinations, and awareness. There is no factual proof of such things. It is not solid. Science can prove that thinking does not exist. It can only be a theory. You know some of it exists, because you're you. For these reasons, science has its faults. This should be a fun topic if someone wants to argue with me about athiests, and science and stuff. Please, forgive me for being me.

Science is a very complex thing and a lot of pleople misunderstand it. It is not complex as in unfathomable, it is that it has gone through a lot of things and that question itself will never cease to be a theme for debate.

A lot of people think science is or should be some kind of truth. So people usually say things that "It is what scientists say" or "it is scientific" as a way of saying "this is the truth" and that creates two big problems.

First: Everybody wants others to see what they do as somehting backed up by science.

Second: People expect science to be some sort of indisputable hard facts.

I like to see science the way some philosophers saw it in the middle of the 20th century. Science is something you can actually disprove. So in order to study something as a part of science, there must be a way to prove that whatever you are stating is false.

Under that definition, social science is excluded, since a lot of its claims cannot be effectively disproved. (That doesn't mean those disciplines are bogus, a hoax or a fraud, it just means they don't fall in this specific definition of science) The same goes towards some branches of philosophy, religion and other stuff.

In this way, science and scientific knowledge is able to function as it is expected to. But also, it implies that scientific knowledge is ever changing, always open for dispute, and can be disproven.

Another consequence is that there is a clear line drawn between science and religion. In which science neither proves nor disproves the existence of god, since god is, by definition, not an object of scientific study.

This way, science actually becomes more resemblant to people's expectations without being the only way to validate knowledge. So that other disciplines can grow each in its respective field without turning into pseudosciences.