Scientific method/Bibliography

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On Thomas Kuhn

The Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Thomas Kuhn

On the Sociobiology Debate

• Segerstrale, Ullica. 'Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate', Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0192862154.

A fascinating look at the historical development and theoretical underpinnings of the sociobiology debate and later scientific controversy.

Historical Introduction

Achinstein P. (editor) (2004) Science Rules: A Historical Introduction to Scientific Methods. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801879432.

• Publisher´s Description:
• Is there a universal set of rules for discovering and testing scientific hypotheses? Since the birth of modern science, philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers have wrestled with this fundamental question of scientific practice. Efforts to devise rigorous methods for obtaining scientific knowledge include the twenty-one rules Descartes proposed in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the four rules of reasoning that begin the third book of Newton's Principia, and continue today in debates over the very possibility of such rules. Bringing together key primary sources spanning almost four centuries, Science Rules introduces readers to scientific methods that have played a prominent role in the history of scientific practice.
• Editor Peter Achinstein includes works by scientists and philosophers of science to offer a new perspective on the nature of scientific reasoning. For each of the methods discussed, he presents the original formulation of the method; selections written by a proponent of the method together with an application to a particular scientific example; and a critical analysis of the method that draws on historical and contemporary sources.
• The methods included in this volume are Cartesian rationalism with an application to Descartes' laws of motion; Newton's inductivism and the law of gravity; two versions of hypothetico-deductivism -- those of William Whewell and Karl Popper -- and the nineteenth-century wave theory of light; Paul Feyerabend's principle of proliferation and Thomas Kuhn's views on scientific values, both of which deny that there are universal rules of method, with an application to Galileo's tower argument. Included also is a famous nineteenth-century debate about scientific reasoning between the hypothetico-deductivist William Whewell and the inductivist John Stuart Mill; and an account of the realism-antirealism dispute about unobservables in science, with a consideration of Perrin's argument for the existence of molecules in the early twentieth century.
• Peter Achinstein is a professor of philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. His previous books include Concepts of Science, Law and Explanation, The Nature of Explanation, Particles and Waves, and The Book of Evidence.
• Table of Contents & Limited Text of Book Online

Additional alternative views

See section on Alternative views in the main article.

• Henry H. Bauer. (1994) Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method. University of Illinois Press. ISBN0252064364, ISBN 9780252064364. Google book preview

• Publisher's description:
• Henry H. Bauer is professor of chemistry and science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
• What is science? Is social science a science? Why are more and more so-called scientific discoveries being exposed as outright frauds? Henry Bauer tackles these and many more intriguing questions that are emerging from within the academic and scientific communities and attracting attention from the popular media and the general public.
• Whether one is a specialist or generalist, scientist or humanist, thinker or activist, it is important to understand the place of science and technology in modern life. Popular views about the nature of science and scientific activity contain serious misconceptions that were discarded decades ago by most historians and philosophers of science. The perpetuation of these misconceptions usually surface in the form of frustrating and unproductive discussions about everything from setting policy and defining technical matters to whether one individual's point of view is "right" because it is supported by "scientific facts."
• According to Bauer, the most serious and widespread misconceptions are that "science" can be discussed as though all sciences share a great deal in common and as though "the scientific method" characterizes all sciences. "Science," argues Bauer, "can be understood only if one recognizes it as a quest by fallible human beings who have evolved ways of interacting that help them gain relatively objective knowledge." In other words, science is a social activity, not simply the result of impersonal methods.
• Concern has recently arisen over the quality of American education and our declining scientific and research orientation. Debates are emerging about what direction public universities should be taking as we head into the twenty-fist century. Why and to what extent should society support basic scientific research? What should everyone in a democratic society know about science? This book will help readers come to an informed understanding about the place of science and technology in today's world.

• Excerpts from the 192 page book:
• For our present purpose, it is sufficient to recognize that these are the salient acknowledged elements of the popular view of being scientifically methodical: empirical, pragmatic, open-minded, skeptical, sensitive to possibilities of falsifying; thereby establishing objective facts leading to hypotheses, to laws, to theories; and incessantly reaching out for new knowledge, new discoveries, new facts, and new theories.
• The burden of the following will be how misleading this view—which I shall call "the myth of the scientific method"—is in many specific directions, how incapable it is of explaining what happens in science, how it is worse than useless as a guide to what society ought to do about science and technology.
• A few years ago, a review article in Science listed many instances in which calculations had been right while experiment had been wrong: for the energy required to break molecules of hydrogen into atoms; for the geometry and energy content of CH₂ (the unstable "molecule" in which two hydrogen atoms are linked to a carbon atom); for the energy required to replace the hydrogen atom in HF (hydrogen fluoride) by a different hydrogen atom; and for others as well. The author, H. F. Schaefer, argued that good calculations—in other words, theory—may quite often be more reliable than experiments . ..
• Science is also supposed to seek new discoveries; but, it turns out, chemists often do not welcome new discoveries. For example, if you read about chemical reactions that oscillate periodically, you find that William C. Bray's discovery of such a reaction in 1921 was simply not believed. Some thirty years later, in 1951, a paper by B. P. Bclousov on the same subject was rejected, the editor saying that the reported results were simply impossible. Finally in the 1970s these results came to be accepted, but only after a theoretical treatment had shown how oscillations could come about. Again, more heed had been paid to theory—which is to say to preconceived belief—than to plain empirical fact.
• The point I do wish to make is that purportedly authoritative pronouncements as well as popular ideas about how science works arc very seriously mistaken. One can find innumerable examples in all the sciences where theory was believed in the face of apparent evidence to the contrary; one can even find such an approach explicitly defended by eminent scientists—for example, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington: "it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that arc put forward until they have been confirmed by theory."
• The false view of science as a unity defined by the unitary scientific method was not perversely adopted holus-bolus in the teeth of the evidence. It is just a naive and now-superseded view that congealed, for quite understandable reasons, during the nineteenth century. Moreover, that it was once a plausible view entails that it can still be made to seem plausible, at least under some circumstances and if one emphasizes some things to the exclusion of others. The classical picture is wrong in nuance perhaps more than through and through. Nevertheless, those errors of nuance have portentous consequences.