Science versus the Scientific Method:

When we talk about the metanarrative of Science we are talking about a body of “facts” and traditions that have a very strict set of rules within a particular paradigm. Within the set of paradigms that we associate with science there is specific vocabulary associated with the scientific method.

While a history associated with science can be assigned to the Greeks and even attribute the start of philosophy with Thales as the beginnings of science this does not relate to the use we typically have for the scientific method. Instead Francis Bacon is generally thought of as the traditional first philosopher to define what would become the method. Most of the following British empiricists are not considered to have followed him in developing this method. Even Descartes, in his attempt to use mathematics to establish clear and distinct knowledge does not use what we call the scientific method.

John Stuart Mill develops methods of induction that are considered the first serious continuation of Bacon’s ideas. Mill’s methods are generally covered in Logic courses for this reason.

An essential element of the scientific method is taking the critical approach to any hypothesis and even to continue to apply the critical approach to accepted facts in the on going attempt to find even commonly accepted facts uncertain and so in need of new theory to explain the weakness of the old theory. In this light, science may be seen as an attempt to advance our knowledge by the constant attempt to find fault with what we think we already know.

Other generations go to air, the infinite, or mixtures of elements such as earth, air, fire, water, but this led to doubt and the Sophists who taught that “man was the measure”. Socrates opposed this view and argued with the Sophists by asking them to define concepts, questioning those definitions to refine them until they ended up changing the definition until it contradicted their earlier formulation. In this way Socrates felt he was demonstrating that they did not know what those concepts were. Apart from getting Socrates killed, this also inspired his student Plato to define the concepts.

Plato tries to solve this issue by asking how do we know what we know? How do we know anything? He creates the philosophy called Idealism with his answer. Ideas are real, material things are not. Ideas, such as triangularity are invisible and eternal. Triangles that we make are temporary. The reason we know an object is triangular is because we know what triangularity is. Matter is corruptible and changing. Ideas are forever. We know the ideas because our soul is like ideas. Our soul has no parts. In order for something to be made it must have parts that are put together. In order for something to be destroyed it must be taken apart. But Plato argues that our souls do not have parts but are invisible and eternal, just as the ideas are. So our souls enable us to connect to the ideas and we know them.

Aristotle is Plato's student and critiques Plato's explanation of how we know. For Aristotle form must have matter and Plato was wrong to think the ideas exist without having matter. We learn what we know from the experience of things. As we will see, Aristotle creates a beautiful logical system that we still use today. His system focuses on the correspondence between categories of things and the words we use to refer to them.

The Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine was primarily Platonic and Aristotle's works, other than some translated by Boethius, were lost to the West until the monks accompanying the Crusaders were given Aristotelian texts by Arab and Jewish scholars. The reintroduction of Aristotle resulted in a confusion in the Church and the conflicts between the philosophy of "The Philosopher" Aristotle and the Church dogma had to be resolved. Saint Thomas of Aquinas resolved this conflict in his great Summae and is considered to have out Plato'd Plato and out Aristotle'd Aristotle by combining the two philosophies together. Faith and Reason work together. This combination resulted in what for most American's today, together with John Locke's view of the primary and secondary qualities of things, is our common sense view of the nature of knowledge.