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I'd say that the scientific method is just a formal process taught to school kids and that most scientists don't follow it either. At least they don't in my fi
by djaque 7y ago
I'd say that the scientific method is just a formal process taught to school kids and that most scientists don't follow it either. At least they don't in my field (physics).
It's more like "hypothesis" -> "experiment" -> "uh, this is kind of weird" -> "changes hypothesis to fit the data" -> "take some more data" -> "huh... here's this cool thing unrelated to any of my other hypotheses" -> "switches topic to something more viable".
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoYou are absolutely right, but I don't think the philosophy of science demands that you actually follow the scientific method during discovery mode. What it says, though, is that if you discover any scientific knowledge, its discovery process must be castable in the way of the scientific method. Meaning, when someone else checks or replicates your result, they can actually follow the four step process, and recreate that same knowledge. Science more than just a collection of facts, is a description of a set of experimental processes that recreate those facts. Which is where the authority-lessness power of it comes from.
- ThouYS 7y agofor me the key lies in the experiment. only by generating new data through new experiments, do we receive robust theories. otherwise we overfit to whatever data is at hand. hence why we need cross validation when working with canned data.