Epistemology III: The Scientific Method

Okay, here ' s the dirty secret: there is no such thing. Scientists use many different methods. Some methods are characteristic of certain disciplines, while within disciplines there may be groups of scientists who specialize in or emphasize various methods. This is territory I fear to tread because it can give people some wrong ideas, also because it ' s quite complicated, but I ' ll try to keep it simple and be careful about walling off the wrong ideas.In fact philosophers have found it very difficult to define science, or to clearly distinguish it from non-science or pseudo-science. Despite the pretensions of some, science is a flawed human enterprise and can be affected by cognitive biases, mistakes, and fraud. It is also dynamic -- we can ' t say that past theories that are no longer considered valid were unscientific. They may have been created by people who were doing perfectly good science at the time. That scientific theories and conclusions are often superseded -- that they turn out to be wrong -- leads some people to decide that there is no reason to believe anything scientists say, and that homeopathy or creationism are just as legitimate. In the jargon, they grant no " privilege " to science over other forms of explanation or knowledge generation.Karl Popper, an Austrian-British philosopher, is well known for maintaining that the main criterion for a proposition being scientific is that it be falsifiable. It has to make predictions which, in principle at least, c...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs