Abstract
“The Scientific Method” as it has been portrayed in popular and introductory contexts has been declared a myth. The variation that one finds in introductory presentations of “The Scientific Method” is explained by the fact that there is no canonical account among historians and philosophers of science. What, in particular, is wrong with “The Scientific Method”? This essay provides a fairly comprehensive survey of shortcomings of “The Scientific Method”. Included are corrections to several misconceptions that often accompany such presentations. Rather than treating “The Scientific Method” as a useful approximation or an ideal, the myth should be discarded. Lessons can be learned for introductory pedagogical contexts from considering the shortcomings of the myth.
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Notes
Newton thought of his own empirical propositions as being the result of the gathering of phenomena by induction. There are well-known criticisms of this method as an accurate portrayal of Newton’s own activity, however. For example, Newton’s First Law of Motion—the law of inertia—can hardly be a mere general summary of observations since no one has ever observed bodies that are not acted upon by any forces and yet the First Law tells us what would happen to material bodies in such situations (Whewell 1847, p. 49; Ladyman 2002, p. 55).
The outside choices in the table were selected to provide extremes. The inner ones are more representative of what one finds usually. As an assignment in a course, I have students find examples of popular and introductory descriptions of “The Scientific Method”. After a few iterations of the course, I’ve collected a healthy stack of examples. A more systematic examination would be an interesting project and better support my claim about variation. (Blachowicz (2009) does something of this sort, looking at 70 textbooks.) For the moment, my support can rest with a challenge: If you doubt it, take an hour just to examine what you find being said about “The Scientific Method” online.
A very enthusiastic presentation of “The Scientific Method” is to be found at www.scientificmethod.com. The website is authored by Norman W. Edmund, the founder of Edmund Scientific—a company well known as a supplier of optical and other scientific gadgetry for educational and amateur uses. The website claims to offer “today’s most up-to-date, complete, clear, concise, and reliable information about the scientific method and scientific method activities that has ever been offered.” It presents “The Scientific Method” in eleven steps or stages along with three supporting ingredients.
Recognizing that “different sources describe the steps of the scientific method in different ways”, William Harris (2012) assures his readers that “Fundamentally, however, they incorporate the same concepts and principles”. The view that presentations of “The Scientific Method” say the same things essentially is rather typical. But it is accurate only if one neglects a number of details.
In their general order, these blended statements of method are not unlike John Stuart Mill’s description of the steps—(1) direct induction, (2) ratiocination, and (3) verification—of what he called “the Deductive Method” (Mill 1881), albeit less subtle. This does raise the issue of how to individuate methods. When a method requires induction for the development of a hypothesis while hypothetico-deductive reasoning is required for its evaluation, is this one method involving two kinds of reasoning or two methods utilized in a sequence?
Bauer did not capitalize the words ‘the scientific method’ nor did he put them in scare quotes, as is the convention in this essay. However, it is clear that his intended target in the book is the so-called scientific method; he used the latter phrase for the title of Chap. 2.
The subjectivity described here is not opposed to rationality. The judgments described are not ones that are characteristically whimsical or a matter of mere taste; they are subjective only in the sense that they depend upon individual expertise.
This is nicely recognized in (Purves et al. 1992, p. 7).
Understanding the importance of social interaction for science also provided the basis for Bauer’s way of distinguishing pseudoscience from science. An inquiry is pseudoscientific not because of a failure to follow the scientific method but when it is pursued in isolation from “the competent, relevant scientific community” (Bauer 1992, p. 60).
In his well known and insightful piece about methods of belief formation and the method of science, the nineteenth century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce observed that inquiry begins with doubt: “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle Inquiry” (Peirce 1877). Question-first accounts seem a better fit with Peirce’s view, although in Peirce’s view merely proposing a question is not sufficient to motivate inquiry. “There must be a real and living doubt.”
A very influential expression of the theory-ladeness of observations can be found in section X, “Revolutions as Changes of World View”, in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
For a critical, technical analysis of the hypothetico-deductive model of inductive support see Lipton 2004, pp. 15–16 and chs. 5 and 6. Lipton accuses the hypothetico-deductive model of being both too permissive and too restrictive. On one hand, according to him, some deductive consequences of a hypothesis are not evidentially relevant; and, on the other, sometimes relevant evidence is not related to a hypothesis by deductive reasoning. Lipton contrasts the hypothetico-deductive model with his theory of inference to the best explanation, arguing for the superiority of the latter with respect to the former.
The terms ‘confirmation’ and ‘disconfirmation’ are preferable to ‘verification’ and ‘falsification’, although sometimes one might encounter the latter pair. The latter terms suggest an absolute verdict on the truth or falsity of the hypothesis H whereas the former terms are more susceptible to interpretations of degree.
There is concern about old evidence especially when the hypothesis is tailored for the very purpose of explaining the data. As compared to the prediction of the results of a test heretofore unperformed, that should count less it would seem, if at all, toward confirming the hypothesis. However, the logic above makes no such distinction (Lipton 2004, ch. 10). When the hypothesis is formulated without regard to, or in ignorance of the data, this concern would not be apt. Such would be the case when the hypothesis is formed without knowledge of the data obtained by someone else. The latter possibility undercuts a presupposition often present in introductory accounts of hypothesis testing—namely, that the same agent is involved in every step of the procedure. Where it is natural to assume that a single agent is involved, placing the testing step after hypothesis formation may represent a way of encoding the belief that a hypothesis ought not be evaluated by data already acquired.
Of course, background beliefs play a role in this example. Thanks go to Casey Swank for bringing to my attention a similar example to this one. The origin of the discussion about cases of a hypothesis that do not support the hypothesis is I. J. Good (1967).
The philosopher of science, Peter Kosso, claims that the main problem with the standard textbook model of scientific method is that it treats scientific theories and hypotheses in a piecemeal fashion, ignoring the large-scale structure of scientific method: “Scientific ideas and practices are essentially interconnected and networked. To understand science, one must consider not just the links between a theory and observations, but between a theory and other theories, and the influence of theories on observations” (Kosso 2009, p. 36).
Blachowicz (2009) noted that a few of out of the 70 texts he surveyed recognized that “confirmation cannot be conclusive if alternative hypotheses are available” (p. 325). Windschitl et al. (2008) propose a view of investigative science they call “model-based inquiry” that recognizes the importance of entertaining competing hypotheses.
Blachowicz (2009, p. 337) found that, in the 70 science texts he investigated, there was little awareness that non-empirical (theoretical) criteria could play a role in hypothesis evaluation.
Campbell et al. (2006) recognize that science uses more than one approach to inquiry and reasoning. Inquiry based on inductive reasoning they describe as "Discovery Science" and inquiry based on deductive reasoning they describe as "Hypothesis-Based Science" (p. 9).
This is not to deny that some overarching framework, like the Bayesian framework, might be able to subsume all these forms into one coherent theory of scientific reasoning.
It is not extremely common, but one occasionally finds the bold claim made that “Science can deal only with things that can be observed” (Kramer 1987, p. 18; see also Keeton 1969, p. 1). Since contemporary science abounds in appeals to unobservables—like subatomic particles, magnetic fields, and spacetime curvature—to explain observable processes, it should be obvious that a claim like this does not sit well with the view that hypotheses are explanatory.
Sometimes it is claimed that deductive reasoning is “if, then” reasoning. (See Blachowicz 2009, p. 317, for discussion on this.) Examples in Sect. 6.4 show that deductive reasoning does not require the use of “if…then…” statements. What such authors seem to be trying to convey is the idea that from a hypothesis H, observable consequences O should be derived. The result of this process can be summarized using a conditional statement—“if H, then O”—for example, “if organisms are composed of cells, then microscopic examination of any part of an organism should reveal cells” (Mader 2010, p. 11). In a single statement, the conditional relates H to the observational consequence O inferred from it (Saladin 2010, p. 8).
Once a chain of reasoning has connected a hypothesis with an observation via some experimental manipulation, a more complex conditional can be formed that relates the hypothesis to the experimental manipulation and the observation in a single statement. For example, ‘if we live in a sea of air that exerts pressure, then if I turn the stopcock, then such and such will happen’. This has the form, ‘if H is true, then if I do A, then I will observe outcome O’. Windschitl et al. (2008) take this to be a preferable form of conditional because it includes the context of the hypothesis (or model). They, unfortunately, continue the confusing practice of calling the whole conditional a “hypothesis”.
Blachowicz (2009) investigated 70 fairly recent high school and college science textbooks and found that the “great majority…stress that genuinely scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable” (p. 313).
For schoolchildren producing a science fair project, however, it may be wise to require them to propose a hypothesis whose proximity to observable consequences is fairly close in order to ensure manageability.
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Acknowledgments
Special gratitude goes to the students in the various iterations of my course, Philosophy of Science, along with audience members at my talks at the 2012 and 2013 meetings of the Minnesota Philosophical Society, the 2013 meeting of the Wisconsin Philosophical Association, and the 2013 Biennial IHPST Conference. Support has been provided from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Academic Affairs Professional Development Program.
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Woodcock, B.A. “The Scientific Method” as Myth and Ideal. Sci & Educ 23, 2069–2093 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9704-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9704-z