How should scientific research and reasoning be carried out? Are there universally- defined rules inherent to scientific discovery, or is it more like modern philosopher Paul Feyerabend1 suggests, as an anarchistic realm punctuated by domains of apparent organization, each with a limited range of usefulness to scientific discovery?
One of the beauties I’ve found in doing research in another country is that, if you listen closely to the talk of your foreign colleagues, you may find the underlying principles of research are going to be defined differently than your own (even alien to your own scientific reasoning). I had this very experience in France, when my colleague was speaking of a mechanism of a chemical reaction and told me that another scientist had “proven” the mechanism was correct. Stop the press…”Wait, you can’t say something is proven in fields outside of mathematics! Everybody knows that you can only disprove a hypothesis, and then only demonstrate strong support for a hypothesis that has not been struck down yet. An experiment has to be falsifiable, but cannot be proven.” In fact, my music-teacher wife still remembers the day, in 11th grade Advanced Biology, when her teacher (Mr. Hjelle, pronounced “Jelly”… yes really) told her that there is no such thing as scientific fact; everything is theory, because we cannot prove anything beyond the shadow of a doubt. We can disprove, but to say we’ve “proven” something is a very arrogant and dismissive view upon scientific research.
The response of my colleague to me was that, in France, it is quite common to refer to something as being proven, as everybody knows that proof is essentially a shorthand or map to express the conditions of the regularities in an extremely well defined experimental setting. In her view, with sufficient support, one can prove something (as an asymptotic narrowing to an accurate description of a regular event). And beyond a certain point, it becomes ridiculous to search for obscure, exhaustive hypotheses to test to disprove something that has been found to be robust from experimentation.
My colleague is the senior researcher in our group, and I admire her scientific rigor and conservative approach in assessing and presenting scientific data to the public. At the time, we had been working together for over nine months. Through her actions, my colleague has repeatedly demonstrated her abilities as a rock-solid scientist. In other words, she is so effective with her approach to science that I have no reason to suspect that her mode of reasoning is any different from my own (which I had learned from my mentors in the USA). Yet it most certainly is different, and the months following have been challenging and enlightening in terms of expanding my approach to scientific discovery. So where was the source of this schism between each of our well-accepted, yet different philosophies of science? Can there be an optimal or universal method of scientific reasoning in scientific discovery, or is there “more than one way to get there”?
As an illustration, if we assume two laboratories on separate continents have expert researchers, well accepted by peer-review and having strong experimental results in the same field, are the two researchers able to arrive at similar results if they have separate scientific philosophies? In other words, as an expert scientist, is your learned approach to scientific reasoning that much better than another’s?
I’ll take the proposition one step further: assume one researcher has an outstanding pedigree in a field of research (say a chemist, like Marie Curie), while another is a bright, talented, very well-read, but self-taught inquirer (let’s say a bookbinder-turned-scientist, like Michael Faraday). The former has been trained to use a rather robust yet strict set of principles based on her own mentor’s rubrics to arrive at well reasoned results, while the latter uses an assembly of methods that he has developed on his own thorough experience. The methods of the latter (self-discovered) are a combination of very systematic experiments (not unlike those of the former) and some rather haphazard modes of experimentation and “exploration”, that do not have a strict rules of progress, but tend to produce positive results nonetheless. Upon arriving at a successfully scientific discovery, both can communicate the results quite well, and have papers accepted into highly regarded journals in the literature. Now, which researcher was the better scientist? It would be an extreme act of prejudice to say the pedigreed scientist was better because of formal qualifications, given the assumption that the self-trained researcher in fact can have the same qualities of insight, rigor, communication and perseverance. But it would be equally biased to place an overwhelming romantic support for the self-taught individual as an underdog of research (something like Good Will Hunting). The fact is, in my illustration I assume they are both excellent scientists, and deserving of praise.
In considering the history of science in France, Germany, Austria/Hungary, England and America and the philosophies of science that developed in each country (perhaps another post), the answer is that yes, there is a difference in our scientific training and our scientific philosophies from France to the USA. Without really knowing it at the time, I had tripped over a break between a few schools of scientific reasoning. In my subsequent investigation, I found that France is influenced by the two systems of inductive reasoning inherited from Pierre-Simon Laplace, and more recent and practical conventionalism favored by Henri Poincaré2, 3 and Pierre Duhem3 (i.e. a hypothesis is neither truly verifiable nor falsifiable, but serves to make generalizations and predictions beyond experience). In contrast, the principle of falsifiability, argued by Karl Popper is in opposition to inductive reasoning. Falsifiability has been eagerly accepted in the USA as a core scientific reasoning tenet to separate “science” from “non-science”. Arguably, falsifiability is not really the only manner in which experimentation and inquiry occurs. And even though several modern philosophers have argued against falsifiability as a basis for scientific reasoning and have subsequently suggested alternatives that are more closely related to science in practice, many American scientists have clung to Popper’s criterion. To my honest surprise, I also found myself unquestioningly in lock-step with it in the earlier conversation with my colleague.
This led me to think, perhaps there are more important questions than asking why there are different modes of scientific reasoning; such as why was I conditioned to think that there is a fixed and ordained philosophy of science? In essence, I have trained for 15 years within the shadow of a doctrine of scientific reasoning, and in the process it has been necessary to condition (and some would argue brainwash) myself into that doctrine to pass through the hoops of academia. It is the consequence and necessity of a doctorate in science. One of the components in my education that I sought out on my own was information in the history and philosophy of science–something to add awareness to your our scientific preconceptions. As I walk away from the training of the USA and into the sphere of another doctrine of scientific reasoning, I have discovered new tools and perspectives that I believe will make me a better scientist and mentor. Not the least important result of this call to order is the reminder to encourage my future students to read as much as they can in the philosophy of scientific reasoning and the philosophy of science.
One can also find these fixed vantage points in scientific reasoning across various fields of research. In fact, I propose that discovering these differences through interdisciplinary research can hold some of the tools to make scientific breakthoughs. It’s the moment of “Huh, I never thought of it that way…” And why?, not because one doesn’t have the cognitive skills and imagination to arrive at a certain line of reasoning, but rather because one was not introduced to the extent of using an alternative scientific reasoning by training. Once you’ve defined a point of view, pick another one and see if you like the scenery. There’s plenty more where that came from!
References and suggested readings:
1. Feyerabend, P. 1975 Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso.
Discussion of Feyerabend’s “Against Method” by Paul Newall at the Galilean Library
2. Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912). Mauro Murzi, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 29, 2006. (including a summary of his perspectives on Conventionalism, science and hypothesis)
3. Howard, D. 2005 Physics Today, December, 34.
