[PREV - LIMITED_HEAD]    [TOP]

FIVE_STEP_SCIENCE

                                             August 10, 2020

There's a tale they tell school kids,
or used to, about The Scientific Method,
and the five steps you follow in order:

  Observation
  Hypothesis                      Quoted from Jessica Riskin's
  Prediction                      review of Henry M. Cowles'
  Experiment                      "The Scientific Method".
  Confirmation
                                                      LIMITED_HEAD
And once you proceed through
"Confirmation", you repeat the
cycle in an ever ascending spiral
eternally approaching The Truth.

   I remember reading about this when I was a kid,
   and trying to methodically apply this "method",
   creating forms on paper with five boxes I'd
   then try to fill in--

      As is typical of filling in forms, it could be
      done but required re-working and simplifying
      to squeeze the information into the slots.


This, of course, seemed very awkward and hard to work with...
A point that Riskin makes in her review, in jokey fashion,
suggesting the steps aren't so obviously seperate and isolated,
and in real cases may be followed in different orders or even
all at once, simultaneously.

These steps are clearly an idealization, of the
process *some* scientists have followed, but
calling it The Method is at best an exaggeration.

There are many things we would identify as
scientific work that don't fit this description.

A naturalist cataloging types of fungus found in
North American forests might not have any
over-arching theory underlying what they're
studying and no particular "hypothesis" to
investigate, nevertheless this kind of basic
data-gathering remains a good and useful
component of scientific work.

And while predictions are always nice, there's no
reason you can't do an experiment without any
such preconceptions-- you might measure a physical
constant without caring what the result is, as long
as you get one you can trust.

So this five step "scientific method" seems like
another attempt at pretending that everything is
neater and more rational than it really is, another
symptom of the hunger for certainty.



--------
[NEXT - BERUBE_SCIENCE_WARS]