THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-217
Author(s):  
W. I. Card
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Weather Forecasting ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
History Of

In the history of science, it is difficult to think of any activity that was traditionally carried out by empirical methods, an activity such as agriculture on weather forecasting, in which when it was introduced, the scientific method has not proved far superior. It is difficult to believe that it will not prove equally so in medicine. The most immediate benefit might result from test reduction, as there is much evidence that all of us tend to ask for unnecessary numbers of tests.

Scientific Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anouk Barberousse
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Scientific Change ◽  
General Question ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dynamics Of Science

How should we think of the dynamics of science? What are the relationships between an earlier theory and the theory that has superseded it? This chapter introduces the heated debates on the nature of scientific change, at the intersection of philosophy of science and history of science, and their bearing on the more general question of the rationality of the scientific enterprise. It focuses on the issue of the continuity or discontinuity of scientific change and the various versions of the incommensurability thesis one may uphold. Historicist views are balanced against nagging questions regarding scientific progress (Is there such a thing? If so, how should it be defined?), the causes of scientific change (Are they to be found within scientific method itself?), and its necessity (Is the history of scientific developments an argument in favor of realism, or could we have had entirely different sciences?).

scholarly journals In Search of an Evanescent Object: Science and Its History

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Logical Positivist ◽  
Current State ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Experiment Verification ◽  
History Of ◽  
Images Of Science ◽  
Selection Of

The authors start from the premise that science is an empirical manifold and then examine different ways of dealing with it. The traditional essentialist approach would construct a single “essence,” a unique and normative set of distinctive qualities that is to be found with minor variations in any branch of science. The usual elements in such a set are the concepts of fact, method, theory, experiment, verification and falsification, while any social, political and cultural processes or factors are discounted as external and collateral. This approach would provide a relatively straightforward account of what science is and reliably distinguish science from everything that is not science so that its claim to autonomy would be supported by a normative “strong” image of science. The history of science would then be reduced to a selection of illustrations of how that essence was formed and implemented. The most well-known versions of this essence and strong image are derived from a logical positivist philosophy of science and from the self-descriptions of many scientists, which are usually considered the authoritative explanation of science and often referred to when science is popularized. The authors point out some considerations that cast doubt on this privilege of self-description. Furthermore, scientificity requires that science itself become an object of specialized research. Studying the activities of scientists and scientific communities using the empirical methods of sociology, history and anthropology has exposed a divergence between the normative “strong” image and the actually observed variety of sciences, methodologies, ways to be scientists, etc. When those empirical disciplines are applied to science, they do not provide an alternative “strong” image of it, but instead construct a relativized and pluralistic “weak” one. The authors locate the crux of the dilemma of choosing between these images of science at the point where the desire to study science meets the urge to defend its autonomy. The article closes by briefly describing the current state of the history of science and outlining the possible advantages of choosing the “weak” image.

Marketing, Scientific Progress, and Scientific Method

1983 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
History Of

It is argued that the long debate concerning the scientific credentials of marketing has been couched in terms of an idealized notion of science as the ultimate source of objectively certified knowledge. A review of contemporary literature in the philosophy, sociology, and history of science reveals that this canonical conception of science cannot be supported. The implications of this literature for the marketing–as–science debate are developed, and practical measures for the enhancement of scientific practice in marketing are discussed.

Kuhn, Normativiy and History and Philosophy of Science

EPISTEMOLOGIA ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Naturalistic Account

The paper addresses the relation between the history and philosophy of science by way of the issue of epistemic normativity. Historical evidence of change of scientific method may seem to support epistemic relativism. But this does not entail that epistemic justification varies with methods employed by scientists. An argument is required that justification depends on such methods. Following discussion of Kuhn, the paper considers treatment of epistemic normativity by Lakatos, Laudan and Worrall. Lakatos and Laudan propose that the history of science may adjudicate between theories of method. Historical episodes are selected on the basis of value judgements or pre-analytic intuitions, which are themselves problematic. Laudan proposed the naturalist view that a rule of method be evaluated empirically on the basis of reliability in conducing to cognitive aims. Against this, Worrall argued that the normative force of appeal to past reliability requires an a priori inductive principle. In my view, the problem of normativity is solved by combining a particularist focus on specific episodes in the history of science with a naturalistic account of the reliability of method.

Actual Consciousness: Database, Physicalities, Theory, Criteria, No Unique Mystery

2015 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 271-300
Author(s):  
Ted Honderich
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

Abstract(i) Is disagreement about consciousness largely owed to no adequate initial clarification of the subject, to people in fact answering different questions – despite five leading ideas of consciousness? (ii) Your being conscious in the primary ordinary sense, to sum up a wide figurative database, is initially clarified as something's being actual – clarified as actual consciousness. (iii) Philosophical method like the scientific method includes transition from the figurative to literal theory or analysis. (iv) A new theory will also satisfy various criteria not satisfied by many existing theories. (v) The objective physical world has specifiable general characteristics including spatiality, lawfulness, being in science, connections with perception, and so on. (vi) Actualism, the literal theory or analysis of actual consciousness, deriving mainly from the figurative database, is that actual consciousness has counterpart but partly different general characteristics. Actual consciousness is thus subjectively physical. So physicality in general consists in objective and also subjective physicality. (vii) Consciousness in the case of perception is only the dependent existence of a subjective external physical world out there, often a room. (viii) But cognitive and affective consciousness, various kinds of thinking and wanting, differently subjectively physical, is internal – subjectively physical representations-with-attitude, representations that also are actual. They differ from the representations that are lines of type, sounds etc. by being actual. (ix) Thus they involve a subjectivity or individuality that is a lawful unity. (x) Actualism, both an externalism and an internalism, does not impose on consciousness a flat uniformuity, and it uniquely satisfies the various criteria for an adequate theory, including naturalism. (xi) Actual consciousness is a right subject and is a necessary part of any inquiry whatever into consciousness. (xii) All of it is a subject for more science, a workplace. (xiii) There is no unique barrier or impediment whatever to science, as often said, no want of understanding of the mind-consciousness connection (Nagel), no known unique hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers), no insuperable difficulty having to do with physicality and the history of science (Chomsky), no arguable ground at all of mysterianism (McGinn).

scholarly journals How Deployment Realism withstands Doppelt's Criticisms

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Alai
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Explicit Formulation ◽  
Approximate Truth ◽  
Predictive Success ◽  
History Of ◽  
Explanatory Success

Gerald Doppelt claims that Deployment Realism cannot withstand the antirealist objections based on the “pessimistic meta-induction” and Laudan’s historical counterexamples. Moreover it is incomplete, as it purports to explain the predictive success of theories, but overlooks the necessity to explain also their explanatory success. Accordingly, he proposes a new version of realism, presented as the best explanation of both predictive and explanatory success, and committed only to the truth of best current theories, not of the discarded ones (Doppelt (2007, 2011, 2013, 2014). Elsewhere I criticized his new brand of realism. Here instead I argue that (a) Doppelt has not shown that Deployment Realism cannot solve the problems raised by the history of science, (b) explaining explanatory success does not add much to explaining novel predictive success, and (c) Doppelt is right that truth is not a sufficient explanans, but for different reasons, and this does not refute Deployment Realism, but helps to detail it better. In a more explicit formulation, the realist IBE concludes not only to the truth of theories, but also to the reliability of scientists and scientific method, the order and simplicity of nature, and the approximate truth of background theories.

Method and Control

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-77
Author(s):  
William Lynch ◽  
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
Future Utility ◽  
And Control

It has been widely noted that rules for scientific method fail to produce results consistent with those rules. Daniel Garber goes further by showing not only that there is a gap between Francis Bacon’s methodological rules, outlined in the Novum organum, and his natural philosophical conclusions, but that his conception of natural forms informs the method in the first place. What needs further examination is why Bacon’s application of his method manifestly violates his rules. Garber appeals to the spirit of Bacon’s method, rather its letter, which allows him to reconcile an appreciation of Bacon’s impact on modern science with a contextualist approach to the history of philosophy. A better approach looks at the larger significance of mythological accounts of scientific method, that understand seventeenthcentury methodological doctrines as ideologies naturalizing scientific culture and outlining news ambitions for the control of nature. By examining Bacon’s followers in the Royal Society, we can see how Bacon’s “temporary” use of hypotheses helped secure support with the promise of future utility. The history of philosophy of science should focus on the conditions leading to emergence of certain kinds of distinctively modern discourses, practices, and ambitions going beyond the internal history of science.

Piaget and Garcia's History of Science

1990 ◽  
Vol 35 (7) ◽  
pp. 654-656
Author(s):  
Harry Beilin
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
History Of
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