{"id":138866,"date":"2021-04-27T09:48:15","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T17:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138866"},"modified":"2021-04-27T09:52:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T17:52:11","slug":"the-scientific-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138866","title":{"rendered":"The Scientific Method"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica Riskin writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* Here, then, is the answer to when, where, and how \u201cthe scientific method\u201d originated: not in any field or practice of science, but in the popular, professional, industrial, and commercial exploitation of its authority. This exploitation crucially involved the insistence that science held an exclusive monopoly on truth, knowledge, and authority, a monopoly for which \u201cthe scientific method\u201d was a guarantee.<\/p>\n

* I would call it a feat of branding equal to \u201cdiamonds are forever\u201d or \u201cCoke is it\u201d: \u201cThe scientific method\u201d became science\u2019s brand.<\/p>\n

* Bohr reflected that any observation involves an interference with the thing observed. Our own acts of observation are a part of the world we see: we are \u201cboth onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence.\u201d Heisenberg elaborated the idea by emphasizing that \u201cwhat we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,\u201d and that science was therefore \u201ca part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.\u201d Scientists in this period were recognizing the necessity of interpretation and putting that recognition to work in radical new ways that were neither humanistic nor scientific but integrally both. Meanwhile \u201cthe scientific method\u201d continued in pursuit of its manifest destiny.<\/p>\n

* David Starr Jordan\u2014Stanford\u2019s first president, an ichthyologist, and avid eugenicist\u2014announced that the extended application of the scientific method had transformed education, calling it a \u201cmagic wand.\u201d Among Stanford\u2019s twenty-two founding faculty members was (the confusingly named) Fernando Sanford, a physicist specializing in electricity and its applications, and a partisan of the scientific method. Sanford gave the address at Stanford\u2019s eighth commencement in 1899 where, with great simplicity and lucidity, he bestowed the scientific method upon the new graduates. First, collect facts; second, seek out causal relations among these; third, deduce conclusions; fourth, perform experiments to test these conclusions. Sanford also warned his audience to be on their guard against practitioners in fields such as history, philology, and even Latin who, \u201cwish[ing] to appear especially progressive,\u201d had \u201clearned to use the language and to adopt the name of the scientific method.\u201d These were mere pretenders; the scientific method bore no relation to language or literature, nor they to it, and Sanford closed by advising these scholars that if they didn\u2019t want to be left in the dust, they could bloody well go out and find their own methods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Riskin writes: * Here, then, is the answer to when, where, and how \u201cthe scientific method\u201d originated: not in any field or practice of science, but in the popular, professional, industrial, and commercial exploitation of its authority. This exploitation … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138866"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138871,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138866\/revisions\/138871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}