Do you want to know how to apply the scientific method in research? This discussion of the scientific method in research covers the philosophical foundations and historical roots of the scientific method, key scientific method steps and definitions, and the defining characteristics of the scientific method.
I obtained my PhD degree in Digital Transformation and Innovation in April 2020 from the PhD in DTI uOttawa Program at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Faculty of Engineering, on the topic of ethical hacking sociotechnology. My uOttawa PhD thesis was titled Technoethics and sensemaking: Risk assessment and knowledge management of ethical hacking in a sociotechnical society (thesis advisory committee: uOttawa professors Rocci Luppicini, Liam Peyton, and Andre Vellino).
- Scientific method in research
- A brief history of the scientific method
- A non-justificationist theory of science
- Critical rationalism
- Pragmatism
- Scientific method steps
- Scientific method and trust
- Defining characteristics of the scientific method
You may also be interested in What is science? What is the scientific method?
Scientific method in research
A non-justificationist theory of science that underlies a constructivist epistemology of knowledge making was constructed (empirical pragmatism as constructivism) based on integrating two philosophy of science paradigms: critical rationalism and pragmatism.
I used this synthesis of the scientific method in my uOttawa PhD thesis (2020, pp. 72-83) to anchor a social science approach and theoretical framework (STEI-KW) for studying the role of technology in society in the STS SCOT (Science and Technology Studies, Social Construction of Technology) tradition. STEI-KW was used as a theoretical framework for modeling technology governance. More specifically, this discussion constitutes a synthesis of the epistemological foundations of STEI-KW as a social systems theory of society.
A brief history of the scientific method
The scientific method can be traced back to the Scientific Revolution (17th to late 18th century) and especially to the classical rationalism of French philosopher René Descartes and the classical empiricism of his contemporary English philosopher Francis Bacon. The Scientific Revolution began in Europe around the end of the Renaissance period and continued through the late 18th century, ushering in the Enlightenment. The publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 is often cited as marking the beginning of the Scientific Revolution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Descartes and Bacon, widely considered the founders of the scientific method, introduced systematic doubt to scientific inquiry. Both philosophers believed that the way to the truth lies in the application of reason–rational (Descartes) and empirical (Bacon) (Duignan, 2019). Rather than through religious doctrine or emotions, a rationalist would rely on reason and logic to acquire true knowledge about the world. For Descartes, pure reason was the only reliable means to gain knowledge, and the senses had to be doubted–the real world can be accessed and described through logic (dualist realism or mind-matter split). In search of certainty, Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy) discards all belief in things which were not absolutely certain, and then proceeds to establish what can be known for certain, which he concluded was his ability to think–hence, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Cartesian doubt is methodological. It uses doubt as a route to certain knowledge by finding those things which could not be doubted.
In comparison, Bacon took it that all knowledge was attainable through the senses. Often regarded as the father of empiricism, Bacon believed that scientific or objective knowledge (ideally the truth–it is not clear Bacon believed he could necessarily arrive at the truth with certainty through his observationalist-inductivist approach) can be gained based only on inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. Importantly, he argued, scientific knowledge can be achieved by use of a skeptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. Bacon’s method of scientific inquiry was methodical and iterative, and skeptical of a scientist’s lapse into misleading themselves. The Baconian method (in Novum Organum) sought to link cause and effect of a phenomenon by careful observation and an iterative process of elimination. He reasoned: If X is seen to arise in the presence of Y time and time again, while it is not seen to arise in the presence of Z time and time again, we can make a scientific claim by inductive reasoning that Y causes X. Next, the scientist may gather additional data or use existing data and the new axioms to establish additional axioms. The process is repeated in a stepwise manner to build an increasingly complex base of knowledge, one which is always supported by observed facts, or more generally, empirical data.
A non-justificationist theory of science
Since Descartes and Bacon, two key paradigms in the philosophy of science that can be considered critical of previous paradigms would come to dominate our understanding of the scientific method, the critical rationalism of Karl Popper and the classical American pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. Along with Mario Bunge, they all espoused a non-justificationist view of knowledge claims. The key points to explicate in these philosophies pertain to the scientific method and knowledge claims to the truth (how can we validate the veracity of knowledge claims), and the picture that emerges about the nature of knowledge (as constructivist, utilitarian, and tentative). Attention is given to the essence of the scientific method and its relationship to the Enlightenment ideals of liberalism, what the thesis calls core liberal values.
Critical rationalism
Critical rationalism is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies (2013), The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2002), Conjectures and Refutations (2014), The Myth of the Framework (2014), and Unended Quest (2005). Critical rationalism is a philosophical critique of certainty. Its defining logic is skepticism toward knowledge claims.
Popper considered that the strongest motivation for scientific discovery was the search for truth, and sought to determine how truth can be ascribed to scientific knowledge claims. Popper’s philosophy of science and political philosophy is anchored in his critical rationalism and its key concept of falsifiability. The falsifiability approach to the criticism of knowledge claims suggests we cannot positively verify knowledge claims or rationally (in the classical sense) justify them; we can only approach the truth rationally (critically) by reducing our ignorance about the verisimilitude of knowledge claims.
A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable. According to the falsification criterion, only tentative refutation or criticism can be made to support claims about the truthfulness of attained knowledge; knowledge claims can only be verified indirectly, by pointing to outcomes of an experiment that conflict with predictions deduced from the hypothesis. An unlikely theory that conflicts with current observation and is thus false (e.g., all swans are white) is considered to be better than one which fits observations but is highly probable (e.g., all swans have a color). The logic is that it is better a theory can be shown to be wrong and we know it than presumed right and we do not know it (Marsh, 1994). In that sense, the utility of the scientific method is that it gets us closer to the truth.
For Popper, the truthfulness of knowledge claims cannot be justified through pure reason or through empirical induction (shown to be illogical by Hume) or verified by the positivist empiricist approach of logical positivists. Deductive reasoning is circular since the premises already contain the claim of the conclusion. Hume had shown that inductive reasoning is illogical, since “it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument” (1748/1902). Verificationism holds that a statement must, in principle, be empirically verifiable for it be both meaningful and scientific. Popper argued that with their verificationism doctrine logical positivists had mixed two different philosophical problems, that of meaning and that of demarcation. For Popper, falsifiability is the suitable criterion of demarcation of science; and while falsificationism is only concerned with meaningful statements, non-falsifiable statements are not necessarily meaningless.
Pragmatism
For logical positivists, scientific knowledge provided a literal description of objective fact and excluded lived qualitative experience as providing access to the natural world. “Nature as objectified justified nature as an object of value-free human manipulation” (Rosenthal & Buchholz, 2000A, p.38). The mind-matter split implicit in the traditional understanding of scientific study is illusory. For the pragmatist, humans are within nature not outside of it and causally linked to it. Humans are active, creative agents who through meanings help structure the objects of knowledge and who thus cannot be separated from the world known (Rosenthal & Buchholz, 2000A). John Dewey used Heisenberg’s principle of intermediacy to argue, “what is known is seen to be a product in which the act of observation plays a necessary role. Knowing is seen to be a participant in what is finally known” (Dewey, 1984, p. 163). Human activity partially constitutes the nature people experience. For pragmatism,
with its emphasis on broad empiricism and ontological emergence, both facts and values emerge as wedded dimensions of complex contexts which cannot be dissected into atomic bits. The entire fact-value problem as it has emerged from the past tradition of moral philosophy is misguided from the start. (Rosenthal & Buchholz, 2000A, p.46)
Pragmatic theories are rooted in Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, which is the starting point for clarifying the meanings of difficult concepts within pragmatism, such as truth, belief, certainty, and knowledge, in viewing them as outcomes of an inquiry:
Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.
Pragmatism’s alternative to knowledge justification (fallibilism) is inquiry. A pragmatic theory of knowledge is concerned with the utility of knowledge, as opposed to its truthfulness. For Dewey (1938/2018), truth or knowledge (warranted assertions) are the outcome of a problem-solving inquiry. “The best definition of truth from the logical standpoint which is known to me is that by Peirce”:
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real [CP 5.407]. (Dewey, 343 n).
In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey (1938/2018) gave the following definition of inquiry: “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (p. 108). Instrumentalism is the view that the point of scientific theories is to generate reliable predictions. For Dewey the utility of a theory is a matter of its problem-solving power. According to Dewey’s constructivist philosophy, humans construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences: knowledge is subjective and contextual, more precisely, intersubjective, and the viability of beliefs trumps their truthfulness. The notion of knowledge as justified true belief is thus rejected in favor of a more pragmatic approach to knowledge claims–a non-justificationist view of scientific knowledge claims. Dewey’s constructivism is an epistemological theory according to which knowledge is not a description of an independent nature or reality, but a construction, the outcome of interactions between a system and its environment. His theory of knowledge accounts for both the subjective (individual) and intersubjective (sociocultural) dimensions of the construction of knowledge. For Dewey (1912, p. 23), perception is a temporal act, a process of choosing.
Dewey’s ‘transactional realism’ (Sleeper, 1986) locates the act of construction (of objects) in the organism-environment transaction, and it is precisely because of this that Dewey is able to circumvent the (epistemological) choice between idealistic construction and realistic representation. (Biesta & Vanderstraeten, 1997, p. 3)
Since the activities of the organism are a constitutive element of the constructed objects, this suggests that every organism constructs its own reality, implying that “Dewey can only reconcile constructivism and realism at the cost of a radical and fundamental subjectivism” (p. 3).
Popper contrasted his critical rationalism with uncritical or comprehensive rationalism or the justificationist view, that only what can be proven by reason or experience should be accepted as truth (Wettersten, n.d.). Positivist verificationism says the truth of knowledge claims can be verified by positivist empirical testing or observation, and it stands in opposition to Popper’s falsifiability approach which says whether by reason or through observation or measurement, no certainty can ever be made about the truthfulness of knowledge claims–the best you can do is to make a tentative judgement.
Pragmatism holds that general view of knowledge (i.e., Pierce’s pragmatic fallibilism and Dewey’s and James’s instrumentalism) – all beliefs and theories are best treated as working hypotheses which may need to be refined, revised, or rejected in light of future inquiries. This pragmatic orientation to knowledge claims can be seen in Bunge’s philosophy of science, where fallibilism is seen is his use of systems or frameworks. Fallibilism is the general idea that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though their truthfulness cannot be proven with certainty. Popper’s fallibilism holds that though theories (bold conjectures or guesses) could never be positively justified, they may still be rationally accepted provided repeated attempts to falsify them have failed.
Empirical pragmatism can be understood to integrate the basic insights of empirical and rational thinking. Empiricism can be understood as the view that all knowledge has its source in sensory experience (Talisse & Aikin, 2008)–all hypotheses must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.
The scientific method as understood today retains its essence as an exercise in human agency, and its purpose to discover the truth–and although it is doubtful the scientific method can ever generate immutable truths (or that we would know it, since the observer constructs knowledge intersubjectively from sensory inputs, based on past experiences), it can still be useful in generating useful knowledge and testable hypotheses used in making predictions about future events. Scientific knowledge claims are tentative, subject to continuous testing or verification by observation and experimentation.
Scientific method steps
Inductive reasoning involves trying to find a pattern in measurements or observations to infer a hypothesis. Inductive inferences have observations as premises and theories as conclusions. Deductive reasoning involves using an axiom or a general rule to compute the value of an unknown variable, or testing the agreement of test results against a hypothesis.
An experiment is conducted to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions of a hypothesis (Popper, 2003). If the results of an experiment confirm the predictions made by a hypothesis, the hypothesis is deemed more likely to be correct but remains suspect, subject to further testing. If over time a hypothesis becomes well supported, a general theory may be developed.
An iterative process in the form of scientific method steps can be thus outlined: 1) Make an observation (the car won’t start or all swans I have ever seen are white); 2) ask a question (why won’t the car start? Or are all swans white?); 3) create a hypothesis that explains the observation/answers the question (the car’s battery is dead or all swans are white); 4) make a prediction based on the hypothesis (a jump-start will start the car or black swans do not exist); 5) test the prediction (jump-start the car or find a black swan); 6) draw conclusions and refine the hypothesis; and 7) publish the results.
In the words of Richard Feynman, we look for a new law by, first, guessing it. To see if the law that we guessed is right, we compute the consequences of the guess to see what it would imply. Then we compare the computation results to nature or to experiment or experience or observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. And that simple statement is the key to science.
Scientific method and trust
The philosophy of human knowledge (epistemology) includes views on empiricism, rationalism and skepticism. While philosophical skepticism is an approach that questions the possibility of certainty in knowledge, methodological skepticism is an approach that subjects all knowledge claims to scrutiny to sort out true from false claims. Religious skepticism can be understood as a form of philosophical skepticism. For Tillich (2001, Dynamics of Faith), doubt is an element of faith. Those who commit their lives and themselves to a great cause or notion, an “ultimate concern,” have to live with a nagging doubt, an existential doubt, whether they have made the right choice in life–whether this ultimate concern of theirs (e.g., a religion) is the real deal, the truth, or whether they are fooling themselves or wasting their lives. Tillich says those who decide to accept a religion as true are taking a risk, “the risk of faith.” It is because they have doubt (“existential doubt”) that they are able to perform this act of faith (i.e., take a risk). There is always the risk of faith because of existential doubt: Is it really worthwhile? Attitudinal doubt, Tillich says, exists when someone is despairing or cynical of the truth to the point that they become indifferent to finding it.
A scientific society accepts uncertainty as a sociopolitical value in analogy to how scientists accept uncertainty about the truthfulness of knowledge claims derived from scientific inquiries, that is, methodological skepticism. Trust can be understood as a subset of risk, as risk accepting–more specifically, trust can be defined as acceptable uncertainty or acceptable vulnerability. A sociotechnical society is accepting of political risk, which is a form of trust. According to Hofstede’s (1980, 2001) National Culture 6-D Model, Canada and western nations generally score on the lower end of the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension.
Scientific method and an open society: The open system as a biological metaphor is a form of scientific (analogical) reasoning. Open systems (as biological systems) are non-deterministic and change (adapt) in response to a changing environment.
Scientific method and uncertainty and innovation: The key step in applied (methodical) creative thinking is the suspension of judgment about the likelihood or rationality of explored or imagined ideas during brainstorming for solutions to a stated problem (e.g., the Simplex applied creativity model by Basadur, 1998).
Scientific method and uncertainty and critical thinking: A non-critical thinker would decontextualize information from human agency, that is, ignore the constitutive role of values/interests/emotions in constructing knowledge. Such reasoning (seen in logical positivism) is rejected by a non-justificationist view of knowledge claims. For the pragmatist, one cannot extricate fact from value within knowledge claims. A critical thinker understands that knowledge is socially constructed, technology is socially constructed, and “the scientific method” likewise is socially constructed and provisional.
Scientific method and security testing: Information security testing and the scientific method have two nascent streams. One is more academically oriented focusing on the systemization of knowledge (e.g., Herley & Van Oorschot, 2017, 2018; Van Oorschot, 2017), and the other stream more practice oriented focusing on the science of security (e.g., Riley, 2014B). Two key concepts are involved, applying scientific method principles (what the scientific method entails–its logic, and its underlying philosophy of knowledge), and systematization which aims to organize or standardize a body of knowledge to make it more amenable to collaborative use, peer review, and development.
Defining characteristics of the scientific method
- Constructivist (socially constructed) – a value laden, emergent concept
- A model/paradigm/procedure to acquire scientific knowledge (testable hypotheses)
- Methodical – a formalized procedure
- Provisional (until we find a better model), produces tentative (uncertain/unconfirmed) results
- Skeptical about the truthfulness of knowledge claims
- Produces repeatable results (reproducible and replicable)
- Useful in explaining the evidence and in making predictions
- Rationalized – grounded in a philosophy of science regarding how we obtain knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of knowledge (ontology/realism)
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