Scientific Method

How do we come to know something? That is, how do we move from ignorance to understanding, from knowing nothing to knowing something. We have suggested that there are three levels, at least so far, of meaning: common sense, where we relate things to us; theory, where we relate things to other things; and method, when we reflect on how we undertake the other two levels.

The levels of common sense and theory are both really problem-solving levels of meaning. I need to mow my lawn, and I have a choice of scissors, a scythe and a lawnmower. The problem is which to choose, and that might depend on the size and shape of my lawn, the length of the grass and whether I want to preserve the cuttings for straw or compost. These are common-sense issues, the question completed in the concrete aspects of the lawn itself.

At the level of theory I might want to know the trajectory of two billiard balls after they hit each other at such and such a speed and this angle. While I might apply the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to solve the problem, it is still a problem to be solved. In that sense it is much like the lawn cutting problem: it is a problem and we have an idea of how to solve it.

When we get to the level of method, however, we are asking a slightly different question. It is not ‘how do I solve this problem’ but ‘how do I solve problems?’ The question is general; the specifics of the actual problem to hand has dropped away. Put another way, the question at this level is something along the lines of ‘is there a general way to tackle and solve any problem that might face us?’

Reactions to the question are likely to be mixed. You might think ‘Of course not! A problem in physics is different from a problem in history.’ That is, of course, correct, the content varies, but does the approach? Alternatively, you might think ‘Every problem is the same in some way: I might have to think about a problem in history, and then think about one in physics. But it is still me doing the thinking.’ That too is correct, but in a different way. A human thinking is a human thinking, whether that thought is about history or physics or anything else.

We do have some paradigms of human thinking, some good examples where we can see intentional thought going on. By ‘intentional’ I mean actually determinedly thinking about a problem, sitting and thinking how I want to cut the lawn, not just grabbing the lawnmower because that is what I did last time. The best example, and probably the most obvious, is scientific method.

I have lost count of how many news stories start ‘scientists have discovered…’ whether that be exoplanets, new species or treatments for cancer. There are a number of issues at stake here which I shall ignore; the one I want to focus on is the ‘discover’ word. How is it that we go from something that we do not know to something that we do?

The usual answer is by a magical term ‘scientific method’, although that method itself is rather badly defined. If we ask ‘what is scientific method’ we do not usually get a simple, single reply. Method, it seems, varies between disciplines of science and even within a discipline. Normally, we fall back on such ideas as experiment and theory, repeatability, hypothesis and verification. Exactly how these fit together is a bit unclear.

Another objection is that method can start to sound a bit of a mechanical turning of the handle. Many years ago I recall my maths teacher telling us that he was going to teach us fractions in such a way that we understood what was going on. ‘Many of you,’ he said, ‘will have learnt how to do this in primary school by following some rules, such as “write it down, turn the book upside down and use red ink”…’ What he meant was that there are techniques to do things in mathematics, as in science, but just mechanically doing them does not give understanding, only the right answer.

The point is, as Feyerabend observed in Against Method, scientific breakthroughs are not made by those who follow the rules as a mechanical process. You will not find a ‘cure’ for cancer by following what everyone else is doing. The point is to do something different, something new and discover something that was not known when you started or even could be inferred from what was to hand. You might (and should) have good reasons for trying what you do, but you have no guarantee that it will work, or that it will show what you are hoping for.

The process of scientific method, then, is not as clear as we might think or like it to be, but it does give a fairly clear idea as to how systematic investigation works alongside creativity. There are ideas, hypotheses and experimental results. At some point in a scientific investigation you have to sit down and try to work out what is going on. What do these results mean?

The abstraction of these processes and questions could be a view of how human intentional thinking works. We have the data, we sit and stare at it, read around it, ponder it until we get an insight into what is going on. That only works for this set of data, so then we try to generalise it, to work out what happens beyond our data set – that might include theoretical work or more experiments. Then we have to make a judgement call: is this right? We weight the evidence from experiment and theory, we compare with what we already know and we have to decide.

Once we decide, of course, we have to verify the work, perhaps by communicating it in an article or conference report, and, if the scientific community agrees, we can be fairly confident that we have found something new. There is a lot more to the process than simply turning a methodical handle.