Argument against the scientific method

[wellwisher]

Another potential problem is an artifact of specialization. Specialization, can define a lot of detail about a piece of the puzzle. This is very important. But postulating in the context of that detail does not always extrapolate into the correct context of the biggest picture.

Looking at the big picture is different than focusing on a detail in terms of extrapolating theory. Let me demonstrate this with an example. The big picture in this example will be photgraph. What we will do is zoom in and focus on a detail in the picture.

In this case, we see a female face. Athough we can see the details of her face, one is not able to place that face in context of the whole pixture, since you don't know the big picture. We can nevertheless theorize in the context of the details and our expertize. She is a house wife.

In an attempt to prove our detailed theory, we zoom out so more of the picture is seem. Now we notice a young women with sweats clothes, sort of like a dancer. We will need to change our theory, since we can now see her face in the context of a body and clothing; the bigger picture. Next, we try to postulate about this women based on these expanded details. Since she has sweat clothes we postulate she is a person working out at home, since the bias of the housewife lingers.

To test this new theory, we zoom out even more and notice she appears to be in a large room with a wooden floor and there are other females also in dancer sweats. To posulate now, we need to know much more than our specialty, which was faces, since the bigger picture involves faces, bodies, clothes, wood floors, other dancers, etc, thing we may not be fully trained for. You know something about these other things, but feel better in we own habitat where we are an expert. This will bias the theory. Now based on this bigger picture, we she is still a housewife who is trying out for a part in some local dance theatre.

Rather can complete this all the way, via few more zoom outs, to the prima ballerina for a major ballet company, one may notice as the picture zooms out from the speciality piece, to a bigger and bigger picture, the best theory needs to change context. Theories that work fine in a smaller pond may not work in the biggest pond. The specialist may not be able to go all the way into the biggest pond, since he is not trained for that.

The scientists of a century ago had it easier in the sense that there was less science, allowing a better handle on the bigger pictures. For example chemistry and physics had a continuity. Now they use separate ponds, with quarks not having to explain chemical bonding.

Today there is so much data and science, it is harder to define the forest because of the trees. We postulate based on a patch in the forest and call that the universal forest. It is nobody fault, with education not offering a secondary path that starts at the biggest picture and tries to work inward toward the details.

Say we started at the biggest picture of the prima ballerina. This sets the context for everything in the picture. There is less room for speciality postulates that appear to work very well at the level of the detail. Relative to the above example, the very first housewife inference would not have been allowed if we started in the big pond. But it was totally valid in the smallest pond.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Did you choose your wife by applying the scientific method?

Hmmm. That was 34 years ago and I wasn't the same person I am today, but I suppose I did. We dated for two years, during which I gathered considerable evidence germaine to the prospect of marriage. We shared experiences representative of our lives, from traveling to cooking to books to pets to getting up in the morning. We observed how we dealt with things like money, ambition, happiness and disappointment. My friends peer-reviewed my choice. The men thought she was a nice addition to the group, several of the women found her threatening because she was smarter than they were (smarter than some of the guys too but that didn't bother them). I logically reasoned that we were different enough to balance each other but none of the differences would lead to conflict; in fact many of our strengths and weaknesses were complementary. It's hard to apply the scientific method to emotions, but a two-year courtship is long enough for the fireworks and rainbows to fade a little and reveal the everyday creatures underneath, and the everyday creatures were just as attracted to each other without the spark of blooming romance.

I actually had another girlfriend during some of this time so I suppose I was doing the experimentation step in the scientific method. I was able to apply Occam's Razor and reject "the more complicated solution." Or perhaps it was the Rule of Laplace: I did not take seriously the "extraordinary assertion" that she was right for me, since she never presented any evidence to support that assertion.

Psychology is one of the "soft sciences," meaning (in this context) that the scientific method is difficult to apply rigorously. After 34 years this is still the correct choice, so I guess I was rigorous enough under the circumstances. Nonetheless, I take your point that the scientific method cannot be used in everything, but it's always worth thinking about it before discarding it in any situation.

If you work for anyone, besides yourself, there are compromies that need to be made to keep your job and/or to get promotions. The best company man will do better, which means politics. This will not effect the actual science, but will impact the choice of science allowing publication stacking.

You may be wrong about that. The corporatization of science in America (and probably other countries) does indeed affect science here. The goal of science is to find the truth, but the goal of corporate science is to "prove" that the company's product is effective, safe, a bargain, good for the environment, etc. Corporate scientists do not compare their product against their competitors and sometimes decide that the other one is better. At least not if they want to keep their jobs.

Reseach that is empirical always needs resources. The same idea without access may not go anywhere.

And this reality underlies several components of the scientific method:

• Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect. (The Rule of Laplace.) Otherwise scientists would have to dissipate their finite time and other resources examining and disproving crackpottery. Let the crackpot provide some evidence first. If he's a good scientist he should have some, and if he's not then he walked into the wrong academy.
• Test the simplest solution first. (Occam's Razor.) This is not because the simplest solution is usually the right one, as is often erroneously stated. It is because it will be cheaper and faster to test the simplest solution, so that if it happens to be right we've gotten the answer quickly and economically, instead of wasting lots of time, labor and other finite resources, testing the other one before finding out that it doesn't work.
• It is not necessary to prove a negative. (I'm not sure what this principle is called but it's sort of a miniature version of the Rule of Laplace.) If someone says that mating a human with a tortoise will result in a creature with the wisdom of a human and the resilience of a tortoise, it's up to him to try it and present us with the results. Again, why squander our resources if he's not willing to do it himself? If his idea has any merit at all, somewhere in America there is a university student who would love to take it on as a project, and a good-humored professor who will give him course credit for it. Let the crackpot do his own homework and find them!

I mean nothing by this example, other than as a dramatic example. When social engineeering was altering cuture and defining new behavior, science research needed to provide fluff pieces for homosexuality. . . .

You certainly picked a hot-button issue if you truly "mean nothing by it."

The scientists of a century ago had it easier in the sense that there was less science, allowing a better handle on the bigger pictures. For example chemistry and physics had a continuity. Now they use separate ponds, with quarks not having to explain chemical bonding.

I think you didn't put enough effort into picking your example and it doesn't work. Not quarks, precisely, but leptons. Bosons, leptons and quarks make up the twelve kinds of elementary particles, and the electron is one of the six kinds of leptons. Electrons are the key to chemical bonding.

 

[Watcher]

On another forum I was debating with climate change denialists. Someone made the follow comment (I know a red herring, but I bit):

I asked the poster to please tell me what shortcomings the scientific method has, and how those short comings effect the results on climate change science.

This is the response I got. Unfortunely it uses too much philosophical jargon which I am unfamiliar with. What do you think of the following response. Is it accurate?:
[/i]

It's more or less an opinion, so how can you say that it is not accurate? If it correctly presents their thinking at the time, then it is accurate in that sense. I don't see much "jargon" in this, it's just their viewpoint of the way they think the scientific method is being taught.

A better question is whether the response is USEFUL or adds insight in the context of the debate you were having.

I agree to some extent with them in that the Western mind has been trained to revert to pure rationalism to solve difficult problems in virtually all situations whether the "hypothetico-deductive schema" as they call it is appropriate or not.

It is a powerful tool when you are trying to solve a specific problem in science or engineering, AND when you have enough data with enough accuracy to be useful. When trying to INNOVATE on the other hand, in trying to come up with a completely new understanding of climate, or a completely new climate simulation method (just examples), the "scientific method" is not so useful. A purely rational approach is the refuge of the technician, it is not such a useful too for the innovator.

So I think we need to know more about the context of your debate, were you discussing how to deal with one specific set of climate data, or something broader?

 

[Arioch]

How would you test the scientific method using the scientific method?

By turning on my computer and then taking the elevator down to the lobby to get my mail. That makes two successful tests in one day.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Bullshit. Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence when the evidence should be there.

If I'm told that there's a cat in a box but that I can't open it to confirm this I can always take an x-ray of the box. If the x-ray shows an empty box(or a box with a dog in it) it is an absence of evidence that there is a cat in the box, but it's also damning evidence that there isn't one in there.

 

[ughaibu]

By turning on my computer and then taking the elevator down to the lobby to get my mail. That makes two successful tests in one day.

Not really. Assuming that falsifiability is an essential element of the scientific method, the problem is that falsifiability is unfalsifiable. Because if it were false, it couldn't falsify.

 

[Arioch]

@ughaibu --

By turning on my computer I'm verifying that the products of the scientific method work, and if the products work that is evidence that the method itself works.

 

[kwhilborn]

@ arioch,

“
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
”

Arioch - Bullshit. Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence when the evidence should be there.

So if someone said there were radio waves a few hundred years ago, and someone else said, "come on woo-woo wheres the proof?"

How would they show the proof.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

seems like a valid statement to me.

In case you were wondering there was no evidence of radio waves a few hundred years ago. It is only recently that we know everything.

@ everyone else,
The scientific method is flawed however. In the above scenario radio waves could not be proved 200 years ago. Does this mean they didn't exist? That is ridiculous.

To prove radio waves existed we needed to show they did with REPEATABLE experiments showing POSITIVE results.

We may be a few hundred years away from proving that minds can communicate with each other. This can be dismissed by many of you because your grade 11 textbooks claim it is not possible, however that is only due to a flaw in the scientific method.

Imagine that many psychic researchers are always finding positive results in their work. We could form a hypothesis something like, "Dark matter carries thoughts from one person to the next." Then we must be able to perform experiments with repeated success.

What if we were only successful 75% of the time. How many "coincidences" equals proof? If 75% success rate was considered proof by science then we might be centuries ahead in the research of telepathy, as 75% hit rates are fairly easy to achieve.

75% of proof is not proof though according to the scientific method. So until the scientific method is changed, or physics eventually catches up to telepathy by accident, or from a roundabout way. We won't be allowed to discuss the topics in our grade 11 textbooks.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

[ughaibu]

By turning on my computer I'm verifying that the products of the scientific method work, and if the products work that is evidence that the method itself works.

I take it, then, that you're a verificationist, and reject the requirement for falsifiability.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

We may be a few hundred years away from proving that minds can communicate with each other.

The scientific method only proves things true beyond a reasonable doubt, not absolutely true. (I use the language of law because the language of science is useful for communication among professional scientists but is abysmally poor for communication between scientists and laymen and is only marginally adequate for the rest of us.) There is always a non-zero chance that any scientific theory will be falsified in the future because we cannot predict the evidence that future scientists might observe with their vastly superior instruments.

However, the actual rate of falsification of scientific theories is very low. In fact in most cases they are not falsified, but merely added to. Newton's Laws of Motion, for example, were not falsified by Einstein. In fact for all practical purposes they are still valid for those of us who plan on spending the rest of our lives in a gravity well and never traveling at more than a few millionths of the speed of light. Einstein merely added some footnotes which, while gigantic, have little practical significance to anyone who was not in Hiroshima on the wrong day or who does not care to understand where the electricity for his Wii controller comes from.

This is why the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt" is added. It is unreasonable to doubt the average scientific theory. The probability of that doubt being vindicated is so small, and the average effect on any individual of that vindication is so minimal, that the expected value of holding that doubt is negative. In other words to mismanage the cost-benefit analysis of these probabilities, and adopt a consistently skeptical attitude toward science because of a misunderstanding of the scientific method, is far more likely to result in a degradation of one's own quality of life, and even that of one's family and community, than to result in a significant benefit.

This can be dismissed by many of you because your grade 11 textbooks claim it is not possible, however that is only due to a flaw in the scientific method.

Grade 11 textbooks are A) Written for children and B) Procured under government contract from the lowest bidder. If you're an American and keep up with the news you've recently seen some shocking examples of text that should not be in those books but is. I haven't been in a university classroom in 40 years, but based upon the evidence I have to deal with every day (i.e., today's university graduates) I suspect that today you'd have to take a graduate-level science course before you'd hear the scientific method explained accurately rather than dumbed-down into a sound bite. Science generally avoids using the word "impossible," except during its frequent forays into mathematics, whose theories are derived from abstractions rather than reality and therefore can be proven "absolutely true." And of course except when scientists use their generally wretched communication skills to try to communicate with laymen. (Exhibit A: Both the Theory of Evolution and String Theory are called "theories," even though one is part of the scientific canon and the other has barely been elaborated beyond arm-waving.)

Imagine that many psychic researchers are always finding positive results in their work. We could form a hypothesis something like, "Dark matter carries thoughts from one person to the next." Then we must be able to perform experiments with repeated success.

But before we do that we make an office appointment with Professor Ockham, who raps a ruler on our knuckles and reminds us to test the simplest explanation for an observation first--not because it's more likely to be true, but because it's easier to test and discard before devoting massive time and resources to testing the more complicated explanation. To date the simplest explanations for alleged psychic phenomena (coincidence, incompetence, inadequate controls, or old-fashioned fraud) have not been ruled out.

In my own avocation, linguistics, about 15 years ago a team of researchers published the results of a lengthy, labor-intensive, comparative analysis of nearly all of the world's language families that had been studied in any detail (more than 200 representing thousands of individual languages). They came up with a list of fifty words that were cognates in all of them. (With an acceptable number of exceptions, since even the most fundamental word is occasionally replaced by a neologism or a borrowing.) This was trumpeted as proof of the Nostratus Hypothesis: that all human languages are related and evolved from a single ancestral tongue invented in Africa when we were still a single tribe.

Then massively parallel computers became affordable. These results were proven to be well within the expected range of sheer coincidence.

What if we were only successful 75% of the time. How many "coincidences" equals proof?

I'm over my head now. You'll have to ask a statistician. But I promise you that 75% isn't even close, since that's a failure rate of one in four!

If 75% success rate was considered proof by science then we might be centuries ahead in the research of telepathy, as 75% hit rates are fairly easy to achieve.

But your premise holds only if coincidence is the only alternative explanation. I'll be charitable and grant these researchers a sufficent level of honor and experience to rule out fraud and incompetence. But how about inadequate controls? Most scientists--I'd be tempted to say, almost as a screening criterion for the choice of profession--are not very people-oriented and lack both the observational skills and the social skills to check for the unique kinds of innocent, unintentional spillover that can ruin the integrity of these experiments. How about pheromones? Do they have trained dogs in the room?

75% of proof is not proof though according to the scientific method.

I don't know what you mean by 75% proof. Successful experiments must be repeatable--that's the essence of the peer review step in the scientific method. If the peer reviewers find that the experiments fail 25% of the time, that is not "almost a success," but is in fact a dismal failure.

So until the scientific method is changed . . . .

The scientific method has been our guide for 500 years, and in its current form for about half of that time. The fact that it continually fails to validate your pet hypothesis because your experiments are only 75% successful is evidence that it is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing: building a scientific canon out of theories that have been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. If hypotheses with a 25% failure rate of peer review were allowed to be built into that canon, we'd be rebuilding the canon two or three times a year instead of just adjusting it once or twice per century, and it would be nearly useless.

. . . ., or physics eventually catches up to telepathy by accident, or from a roundabout way. . . .

It's telepathy research that needs to catch up. Physics has already drilled down to such a deep level in the structure of the universe that it's butting awkwardly into mathematics and philosophy. If a model of microcosmology featuring bosons, leptons and quarks still doesn't explain the phenomena you claim to observe, then you'll just have to wait a little longer. Perhaps when gravity is finally integrated with the other three Fundamental Forces and gravitons (or something like them) are added to that paradigm, you'll find the link to your research--which had better be performed at the microcosmological level, which is much deeper than the level it's currently at.

You don't just need to prove that a phenomenon exists. You have to explain why. That's the difference between journalism and science.

We won't be allowed to discuss the topics in our grade 11 textbooks.

You're welcome to discuss them as curious phenomena that can be repeated at a rate somewhat higher than coincidence but not high enough to qualify as a scientific theory. This would make an interesting footnote in a section devoted to teaching children how the scientific method works. Oh wait, I don't recall my own high school science books ever defining the scientific method; our class "experiments" were conducted like a cooking class. I had to wait for my second year in college--Caltech, one of the country's leading science-oriented universities. Today it's probably put off until the graduate program.

 

[kwhilborn]

@ Fraggle Rocker,
I do not expect anyone here to realize the extent of controls used in psychic experiments, but double blinds are common. People dealing with receivers do not know what is to be transmitted etc.

the simplest explanations for alleged psychic phenomena (coincidence, incompetence, inadequate controls, or old-fashioned fraud) have not been ruled out.

That does address many concerns people have. No matter how above board the experiments with correct controls, competent staff, there is no possible way of ruling out coincidence. Also people will always assume fraud.

Psychic research was a lot more prominent in the earlier half of the 20th century as the discovery of radio waves made the idea of a similar apparatus in our brains plausible. Psychic research is now limited to probably a dozen universities worldwide.

There were some very well documented telepathy experiments that exceeded critics demands in all aspects. There were lab coat settings, and careful double blind controls with competent staff. The results were well beyond chance.
People were brought in to sleep in locked rooms where they were monitored with cameras. The "senders" (only 1), were sent to another locked room where a sealed envelope was then opened by them. They proceeded to broadcast that picture to the sleeping mind of the receiver.
The sleepers would be woken up during REM sleep (during dreaming), and could often describe scenarios pertaining to the pictures. However nobody videotaping the patients recollections knew what was in the photo until after the results were final.
This experiment met all controls and defied many odds. If you were to prescribe it to chance you would be looking at over 75000:1 odds.

Dream Telepathy
by Montague Ullman, M.D. and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. with Alan Vaughan
Dr. Montague Ullman is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Dr. Stanley Krippner is a psychologist. Together they headed the dream research team at the dream laboratory in Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, where, over a ten-year period, they conducted pioneering scientific experiments in telepathic dreaming. Dream Telepathy, first published in 1973, is the story of those experiments.
The team investigated how one person could transfer thoughts to another while the second person was sleeping, thereby influencing the second person's dreams. And, in fact, experiments with more than 100 subjects over several years demonstrated a significant relationship between what was "sent" and what was "received."
This groundbreaking book offers the first laboratory evidence that our dreams can be affected by the thoughts of distant people. In addition to the mind-to-mind connections of dream telepathy, this book presents two pioneering papers by researcher Charles Honorton, showing strong laboratory evidence of dreams foretelling the future. Dr. Louisa Rhine has written that these precognitive dreams are the most common source of ESP in the average person's life.
Dream Telepathy includes descriptions of the experimental studies themselves and also a section on the theoretical implications of their findings. As Gardner Murphy said in his forword, this book "takes a giant step into the unknown."

There was a documentary done on this while it was being done, however I am unsure where to find any clips from it, however watching a person describing his dream while you are looking at the picture that was broadcast was very convincing.

There is nothing hard about telepathy, and both senders and receivers were just ordinary people.

I live in Toronto, and the funding is so poor in this avenue of research that most participants in experiments are volunteers, and adequate controls and observations were not the easiest to maintain. Our entire set up was only three rooms totaling under 1000 square feet. I believe I can demonstrate an above 90% hit rate on precognition, which is one venue of the paranormal that cannot be viewed as fraudulent. If you can predict an event before it happens, and have no influence on the event, it would be hard t say it is fraud.

When I spoke of the grade eleven textbook version of the scientific method, it is the grade 11 method I was referring to.

You are correct in stating that we do hold many theories that are not based on repeated success in experiments.

PSI experiments would be subject to more scrutiny based on its reputation, and theories are always based on some repeated success of grade eleven scientific method. The scientific method require repeated success. However you were correct in stating that many theories use repeated success of a few experiments to expand on a larger theory.

I am aiming criticism at the scientific method mainly because it does not alow for probabilities. You could get 50000:1 odds that something is true based on competent, double blind, controlled experiments and science will say it was the 1 tiny chance that was the correct choice, and the 50000 was all fluke.

I am not overly critical, as it does hold sway over enough people who accept the results. I accept the 50000:1 odds as proof, as do many others. Maybe my complaints should be directed to PEOPLE who are too close minded to even explore the probabilities.

I have another thread open here on LENR. LENR is real, and has been reproduced hundreds of times all over the world, and has open support from NASA. We have a new energy source. People won't believe that either. I swear you need to smack some people in the head with a rock before they will open their eyes.

Skepticism can be healthy, but it can also be a disease.

 

[Arioch]

@kwhilborn --

So if someone said there were radio waves a few hundred years ago, and someone else said, "come on woo-woo wheres the proof?"

How would they show the proof.

Either you lack reading comprehension or you're deliberately attempting a straw man argument because I already addressed this.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when the evidence should be there. In your example there's no evidence that should be there, therefore in that case absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence, however the statement doesn't always work.

seems like a valid statement to me.

And sometimes it is, but it's not a blanket statement that you can make to cover any sort of bullshit you care to believe in.

The scientific method is flawed however. In the above scenario radio waves could not be proved 200 years ago. Does this mean they didn't exist? That is ridiculous.

Straw man argument. Just because the scientific method would have failed to verify something before the knowledge or the technology required to do so is not a flaw in the method, it's a flaw in the humans using the method. Come up with a better argument and we'll talk.

To prove radio waves existed we needed to show they did with REPEATABLE experiments showing POSITIVE results.

Irrelevant. The technology and prior knowledge necessary for this didn't exist at that time. Remember that science builds on previous knowledge, so lacking that knowledge there's no way they could have possibly discovered radio waves.

We may be a few hundred years away from proving that minds can communicate with each other. This can be dismissed by many of you because your grade 11 textbooks claim it is not possible, however that is only due to a flaw in the scientific method.

No, that's not why it can be dismissed, in fact we have two...well possibly three...very good reasons for dismissing that claim. One is that there's no evidence for it, and no, don't post links to all of the studies, I've read most of them and there are maybe three or four credible studies that didn't show a negative result. Anything which can be asserted without evidence can be just as easily dismissed without evidence.

The second reason is that there is no proposed mechanism, none at all. You lot just say "oh well it's true because of x, y, and z studies showing that they guessed cards right more than fifty percent of the time" but you never propose a mechanism, beyond some of the greatest perversions of quantum mechanics that I've ever seen, by which telepathy could work.

Imagine that many psychic researchers are always finding positive results in their work. We could form a hypothesis something like, "Dark matter carries thoughts from one person to the next." Then we must be able to perform experiments with repeated success.

That certainly would take imagination because it demonstrably doesn't reflect reality...the bit about parapsychologists consistently having successful results I mean.

@ughaibu --

I take it, then, that you're a verificationist, and reject the requirement for falsifiability.

Not at all. If we had come up with atomic theory but when we built the bomb it didn't go off, or imploded instead of exploded, or we found out that atomic theory was completely wrong in describing the atom, that would be a mark against the scientific method. And if more of these missed than hit then it would definitely be a serious problem.

As much as many here would like to make you think otherwise, science is not a religion because science actually works. It produces results.

 

[ughaibu]

Not at all.

Well, in that case it should be clear to you that science cannot demonstrate its own principles, because falsifiability is unfalsifiable.

As much as many here would like to make you think otherwise, science is not a religion because science actually works. It produces results.

This has nothing to do with the matter to which I'm responding. There is no serious argument against the statement that science requires untestable assumptions.

 

[RichW9090]

The scientific method is the best method we have for investigating the physical universe. It is indeed a method, and it is indeed followed more oe less closely, by scientists as they "do" science.

Observation yields facts.
A hypothesis is constructed which explains (relates) those facts.
The hypothesis is tested against additional observations (new facts) and either confirmed or rejected.


The key to understanding the whole thing, semantics aside (most of the posts above centered on mere semantic issues) is that scientific explanations (hypotheses and theories) are probabalistic statements. The two probability values such a statement can never take are 0 or 1. They all fall somewhere in between. Some are more likely than others, but likelihood analysis is different that a truth assessment. The concepts of truth and validity often get brought into the discussion of the scientific method, but they really have nothing to do with it at all - they are characteristics of the formal logic of the arguments being proposed, not of the nature of the knowledge produced by the scientific method. Another way of saying this is that uncertainty is always a part of a scientific explanation.

Finally, I will say that one of the indications that the scientific method is the best we have is simply that it works. It produces.

 

[Arioch]

@ughaibu --

Way to skip over the part of the post where I explained how the scientific method is falsifiable.

 

[charles brough]

What do you think of the following response. Is it accurate?

Discussions of methodology in science are clouded by a dreadful confusion because the phrase "the scientific method" is used in two very different ways, one appropriate and one highly misleading. The appropriate one speaks in a very general way of science as a powerful process for improving understanding. People who use the phrase in this general way may be criticizing dogmatic clinging to beliefs and prejudices, or appreciating careful and systematic reasoning about empirical evidence. Although vague, this general use of the phrase can be more or less appropriate.

On the other hand, the phrase is also commonly used in a much more specific sense -- an entirely misleading sense -- which implies that there is a unique standard method which is central to scientific progress. There is no such unique standard method -- scientific progress requires many methods -- but students in introductory science courses are taught that "The Scientific Method" is a straightforward procedure, involving testing hypotheses derived from theories in order to test those theories.

The "hypothetico-deductive" schema taught to students was not developed as a method at all: It was intended a logical analysis of how scientific theories derive support from evidence, and it was developed in a process that intentionally excluded consideration of the process of discovery in science. Few people learn that this notion came by a tangled route from an unreliable source (philosophical speculation), or that actual research on how science proceeds is still in its infancy. The question of how science is so successful at improving understanding is hardly ever presented as a question at all.

The current situation is harmful in many ways: People in some immature scientific disciplines are actually trying to use this "method" as a guide to research practice; Others are required to pretend to have followed it when they report their results; and everyone is denied the benefit of useful, insightful analysis of how science works."

Inductive reasoning is also known as hypothesis construction because any conclusions made are based on educated predictions. There are three biases that could distort the proper application of induction, thereby preventing the reasoner from forming the best, most logical conclusion based on the clues. These biases include the availability bias, the confirmation bias, and the predictable-world bias.

I guess the obvious philosophical critique of the argument that "the only legitimate way to prove a statement correct/true/false is by using the scientific method", itself has yet to be proven using the scientific method.

In any case, epistomology is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. So in order for him to argue it, he has to abandon it.

The long quote simply explains that exactly what it is has never been completely and simply explained. It is a lot of methods and is generally understood to be that.

There is no doubt but what the Earth is heating, but that we are the cause of that is disputed by economic interests who would be harmed by trying to control it. The preponderance of evidence is that we are causing it, but there is no way science can, with our present techniques, conclusively prove that.

brough
http://civilization-overview.com

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Well, in that case it should be clear to you that science cannot demonstrate its own principles, because falsifiability is unfalsifiable.This has nothing to do with the matter to which I'm responding. There is no serious argument against the statement that science requires untestable assumptions.

The premise upon which the scientific method is based is:

The natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its past and present behavior.​

This is quite falsifiable. Our mythology is full of incidents in which a creature from an invisible, illogical supernatural universe shows up and performs a feat that violates the Laws of Nature in full view of a substantial number of witnesses. In these myths these incidents occur periodically, reminding humans that the natural universe is, in fact, not a closed system.

All that is required to falsify the scientific method is for one of these incidents to occur, now that we have better instruments for observing and recording.

Strangely enough, the easier it becomes to test claims of the supernatural, the less often they occur in places where the technology is at hand. We're way overdue for one of these miracles.

Why do UFOs always land in a cornfield in rural Missouri, instead of on the quad at MIT where a hundred scientists would come running with carts full of instrumentation to verify the event? You'd think they'd rather talk to the scientists than the farmers.

 

[Tiassa]

No fat chicks?

Why do UFOs always land in a cornfield in rural Missouri, instead of on the quad at MIT where a hundred scientists would come running with carts full of instrumentation to verify the event? You'd think they'd rather talk to the scientists than the farmers.

Apparently because they want the cows—

Most intelligent and wise: They come for the cows.
(Season 1, Episode 1 — "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe")​

—and not the Omega Mu kind.

 

[ughaibu]

The premise upon which the scientific method is based is:

The natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its past and present behavior.​

This is quite falsifiable. Our mythology is full of incidents in which a creature from an invisible, illogical supernatural universe shows up and performs a feat that violates the Laws of Nature in full view of a substantial number of witnesses. In these myths these incidents occur periodically, reminding humans that the natural universe is, in fact, not a closed system.

All that is required to falsify the scientific method is for one of these incidents to occur, now that we have better instruments for observing and recording.

None of which changes the fact that falsifiability is itself unfalsifiable. Also from your "premise"; the assumption that the present is the same as the past and that the future will be the same as the present, and the assumption that classical logic is in some relevant sense correct, are both extra-scientific philosophical requirements. That science has requirements, which are not themselves within the remit of science, is entirely uncontroversial.

 

[quadraphonics]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It is if you have conducted a sufficient number of experiments which would reasonably be expected to produce evidence of presence, if whatever is being investigated were indeed present.

The point of that old saw is to address argument from ignorance (I haven't bothered to check, therefore I have no evidence, therefore whatever does not exist), and not the reasonable interpretation of experiments producing negative results. If you read it as literally as you seem to be doing there, you end up with inanity. You would have to insist, for example, that we have no evidence that drinking water does not cause AIDS. After all, those billions of people who have drank water and did not come down with AIDS are simply an "absence of evidence," no? And not to be construed as evidence that drinking water does not, in fact, cause one to develop AIDS?

A clearer wording would have been "absence of experiments is not evidence of absence." A bunch of experiments that returned negative results, are not an "absence of evidence" in any meaningful sense. They are exactly the presence of evidence (of absence).

You can only use the scientific method to test theories that are falsifiable.

More to the point: theories must be falsifiable to qualify as "scientific theories." Any other theories, are not science.

Is the scientific method falsifiable?

The scientific method itself is simply a method, not a theory. It does not, on its own, make any assertions whose truth value is up for evaluation, in the first place.

That said, it is usually paired with naturalism (it would be largely useless without at least some weak form of naturalism - else there are no underlying laws to learn, no expectation of repeatability or explicability, etc.). To some extent, naturalism is a philosophical, rather than scientific, theory. However, it does include various scientific hypotheses (no supernatural forces affect nature, etc.) which can indeed be falsified. If anyone, anywhere can produce a single piece of clear evidence of a supernatural being intervening in nature, then naturalism will be dead. This has not occurred, and so the evidence of said absence has become a veritable mountain.

Meanwhile, if you take naturalism as a given, you can then infer scientific hypotheses from the scientific method, and test them. I.e.: application of the scientific method should result in successively better theories (in the sense of being better able to predict more and more phenomena). If you don't get that result, then you have evidence that the scientific method doesn't work. This has also not happened, despite hundreds of years of trying.

 

[quadraphonics]

You cannot use the scientific method to test the scientific method

Again, I'm not so sure that's quite correct. However:

- hence the scientific method cannot be argued as the best method.

... you have gone in a circle there. You imply that the only basis on which to argue that some "method" is "best" is exactly through verification via the scientific method. But if we accept that premise, we don't need to test the scientific method in the first place, or construct arguments in its favor. You have already assumed that it is not only the best, but the only, method of producing such arguments.

So, you are going to have to pursue some larger framework, if you want to advance arguments about how the scientific method measures up to some other (unspecified, at this point) alternatives. This is the realm of philosophy. And there are many other bases on which to advance arguments about the relative merits of methods of inquiry.