NO SPECIAL METHOD IS REQUIREDThe scientist has no other method than doing his damnedest.
-- P.W. Bridgman
I stated Part 3 of the Myth of Magical Science like this:
Scientists obtain Scientific Knowledge by following The Scientific Method, a uniquely powerful tool for understanding Reality.
Much of the discussion in the literature of the philosophy of science turns around the problem of distinguishing scientific knowledge acquisition from other ways of acquiring knowledge. The philosophers assumed that science is special and were trying to understand exactly how it is special. We could summarize the task they set themselves as two questions: What is the nature of the special method scientists use, and how is it different from and superior to other ways of gaining knowledge?
Any theorist who wants to take this project seriously as a way to come up with an explanation of how science works finds herself in a very difficult position: A special method is required, which must be able to account for all of scientific progress. Furthermore, it must be shown that when what scientists do looks like what happens in non-scientific knowledge acquisition, it really isn't.
A scientist approaching the problem of understanding how science works, and why it has been so amazingly productive, might start out quite differently. Since science is one of the ways that human beings use for learning about themselves and their world, our scientist would examine what we know about other types of thinking and learning. She would certainly include the learning skills that the philosophers of science were trying to exclude -- methods of learning that human beings share with other animals, for example, and the development of ordinary "common-sense" knowledge by human beings. She would be very interested in the question of how scientists use these types of learning and thinking in their work.
For example, one of the most basic forms of learning is learning about something by paying attention to it, without manipulating it in any way. Animals learn this way all the time, and so do scientists. Then there are ways that people learn that are available only to human beings, for example learning about something by reading and thinking about descriptions of what other people have learned before. Obviously, scientists do that a lot, too. A great many other many methods for learning and thinking are used by both scientists and non-scientists.
It is possible that scientists may also learn in ways that non-scientists never use, but that remains to be seen. If we ask our scientist of science, she would say that that is an empirical question. Until we have some well developed evidence showing that scientific knowledge acquisition is somehow special, it is certainly inappropriate to assume that it must be different from other ways of acquiring knowledge.
Even if special methods of learning and thinking that are unique to science do exist, they are certainly not what most scientists use, most of the time. What is required for scientific progress is mainly ordinary curiosity, ordinary awareness, ordinary learning, ordinary reasoning, and fairly ordinary communication. Of course scientists work hard to develop and use precise technical terms for many of the things they talk about, but so do lawyers and golfers and cooks. It would be quite surprising to our scientist of science if she discovered that scientists regularly use an entirely unique type of technicality in their professional jargon.
I'm certainly not claiming that we understand all these ordinary cognitive functions; I am merely saying that we have, so far, no compelling reason to suppose that the curiosity, awareness, thinking, learning and communicating involved in science are different from their ordinary counterparts. One scholar stated the issue quite clearly:
I spent many years trying to distinguish fruitfully between one or more scientific methods, and various methods used by historians, lawyers, medical doctors, people in general, etc. I used to teach courses in history of science, and occasionally philosophy of science for a philosophy department. I was never able to find a convincing set of arguments which showed that the methods of scientists differed in some fundamental way from methods used in other fields. That is, logical reasoning was of the same nature throughout, uses of precedent and past experience were of the same nature, uses of observation, evidence and (when available) experiment were of the same nature, and so on.
Gordon Fisher -- (Full text no longer available on the Web)
Scientists generally use, in their work, the same types of cognition as regular folks. Furthermore, there is also no unique method, used by all scientists, that could reasonably be called "The Scientific Method." In his book Reflections of a Physicist, Percy W. Bridgman addressed the issue from the perspective of the scientist:
Scientific method is something talked about by people standing on the outside and wondering how the scientist manages to do it....
What appears to [the working scientist] as the essence of the situation is that he is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. In his attack on his specific problem he suffers no inhibitions of precedent or authority, but is completely free to adopt any course that his ingenuity is capable of suggesting to him. No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow. In short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
Percy W. Bridgman -- "On Scientific Method"
In summary, scientists actually use quite a lot of methods: There is no single method that all scientists use, and most of the methods they do use are not all that special -- they're used in a lot of other professions, methods like "trial and error," for example.
Furthermore, the so called "Scientific Method" that students are taught, the "hypothetico-deductive method," can't be followed, because it's not really a method at all -- it's an failed attempt to give a logical analysis of how empirical knowledge depends on evidence. When people take it as a method and try to follow it, it leads to serious problems. These are somewhat involved topics that I've decided to put on a separate page:
The Myth of the Magical "Scientific Method"
I call it "The Magical Scientific Method" because it was supposed to provide a fail-safe route to empirically valid knowledge, but it never worked as promised. The program failed partly because the logical analysis was incorrect -- but the main problem was that science just isn't that simple. As in the Sherlock Holmes stories, there's just no predicting what astonishing observations and inferences we humans will come up with next.
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