>wouldn't be truly appreciated as part of a formal, scientific method... until... [later] thinkers really formalized it. They didn't formalize empiricism or th

>wouldn't be truly appreciated as part of a formal, scientific method... until... [later] thinkers really formalized it. They didn't formalize empiricism or the scientific method. They couldn't have because they didn't have the tools. In fact, it's still not formal. The reason nobody formalized the scientific method is that science depends entirely on the process of induction, and nobody understood induction in any kind of formal, rigorous, mathematical way until the middle part of the 20th century, with the work of men like Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, Vapnik, and Chaitin.