Scientific Method

People often talk about " the " scientific method but in fact there is no such thing. Scientists use many different methods, depending on the nature of the question, the availability of information, and the feasibility of approaches. You ' ll often see facile remarks such as " correlation does not imply causation, " which is in fact not necessarily true. The confidence one can have in causal inference based on purely observational data depends on many factors.The entire concept of causation is philosophically slippery, I must say at first. I won ' t get into a deep discussion of this because it ' s an entire graduate course in philosophy. But I ' ll give you a couple of quick things to think about.A rudimentary concept of causation is that If ((If not A then Not B) and (If A then B)) is true, A causes B. We always see B in association with A, and never not in association with A. If this is so, then B could also cause A, unless A always precedes B in time. However, there are still several problems with this. What if A has a necessary cause C? Then can we not say that C causes B? Maybe, but perhaps C only causes A sometimes and D is also necessary. Or perhaps A and B both have a joint cause, such that they always exist together because E causes both A and B, but maybe only if also C. .  . And so on, you can play this out as much as you like. Anyway, the first condition almost never pertains. In the real world, sometimes you ' re going to see A without B -- it ' s always mo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs