Debunking a myth: "the" scientific method

There is not one scientific method. There are scientific methods, in plural.

“The” scientific method, in the singular, is an inaccurate depiction of how the sciences work in practice. A heuristic appropriate for elementary school, perhaps, but one that does not stand up to scrutiny.?

The problem is, “the” method remains a widespread myth. Authors employ it in bestsellers. Science popularizers feel they must pay tribute to it. Even LinkedIn denizens, with all the comma-separated, manicured titles and micro-hagiographies that accompany the mere mention of their names, have succumbed to its allure.

The phrase brims with enlightenment-era connotations and can easily serve to frame its user as the more rational and browbeating person in the room, while also relieving them from the twin obligations of conceptual clarity and supporting evidence to justify what they regard as “the” method. It can be the perfect rhetorical device to sidestep intellectual rigor and appear as its ultimate champion, all at once.?

Despite all the fanfare, “the” method is an article of faith that crumbles by its own framework.

Don’t take anyone’s word for it. Run the tests and see for yourself. Do laboratory practices vindicate “the” method? Are all the major discoveries, shifts, and disciplinary advances witnessed over the last 200 years accounted for by “the” method? What do professional scientists think about it?

Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have extensively researched these questions (I list some of their works below), and Steven Shapin summarizes their verdict: “those of us who teach introductory survey courses usually have to tell our students that ‘science’ is not a self-evident historical category, that early modern ‘natural philosophy’ was a different thing than ‘mathematics,’ that the ‘Scientific Method’ is, and always has been, subject to diverse construals, and even that what counted (and counts) as ‘the mechanical philosophy’ or ‘the experimental philosophy’ varied enormously.”

Not only will you encounter contradictory formulations of “the” method, but you will also find brazen rejections of the very notion.

Here’s a tasting menu. Chemist James Bryant Conant maintained there was “no such thing as the scientific method. If there were, surely an examination of the history of physics, chemistry, and biology would reveal it.” Nobel laureate in physics Percy Bridgman remarked that a scientist “feels complete freedom to utilize any method” and “adopt any course that his ingenuity is capable of suggesting to him.”?

By some contrast, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a believer in “the” method, but his definition is so loose that it arguably no longer makes sense to even speak of “method”: “The scientific method is do whatever it takes — whatever it takes — to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or into thinking that something is not true that is.”

Others who have no qualms with the term do not accept it without serious caveats. For instance, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein deems “the” scientific method to be “correct, but not entirely true, because it gives the sense that this is an orderly process, which it almost never is.”?

In short, an inspection of practitioner perspectives shows fundamental divergence on what “the” method of science is, or should be, if there is one at all.?

The sciences do not operate according to an epistemic straightjacket — empirical research and theorization are messier than linear outlines of “the” method make them sound. There are multiple legitimate methods of empirical inquiry, and we are better off embracing an epistemic pluralism (not to be confused with relativism) akin to the one advanced by Hasok Chang. Neither “anything goes,” nor “one thing goes”; but rather, “many things go.”?

The key is to keep an open mind, acknowledge the strengths and limits of competing empirical approaches, flesh out assumptions, and refine what works.

If you want more, or if you’re not convinced, here’s further reading:

Andersen, Hanne, Brian Hepburn. “Scientific Method” (2020 ed.), plato.stanford.edu.?

Biener, Zvi, Eric Schliesser (eds). 2014. Newton and Empiricism.

Borgerson, Kirstin. “Evidence-based Alternative Medicine?” (2005).

Chang, Hasok. 2004. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress.

Chang, Hasok. 2012. Is Water H?O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism.

Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method.

Firestein, Stuart. 2012. Ignorance: How it Drives Science.

Hacking, Ian. “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences” (1992) in Pickering, Andrew (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture.

Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: how the sciences make knowledge.

Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action.

Shapin, Steven. 2010. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science…

Thurs, Daniel P. “That the scientific method accurately reflects what scientists actually do” (2015) in Numbers, Ronald L., Kostas Kampourakis (eds.), Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science.

Woodcock, Brian A. “‘The Scientific Method’ as Myth and Ideal” (2014).?