Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to show how the scientific method emerged and demonstrate the need for changes in the search for scientific truth due to numerous questions about its effectiveness. There are several questions from great artisans and thinkers of science like Edgar Morin, Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, Henri Poincaré, Albert Einstein, Pierre Duhem and Paul Feyerabend who contest that the current scientific method provides the search for scientific truth and claim another approach. Our proposal is that a new scientific method be developed that takes these questions into account.
The search for an adequate scientific method guided the action of most thinkers of the 16th and 17th centuries, standing out among them Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, who with their contributions were decisive for the structuring of what we call today of modern science. Galileo Galilei was the first theorist of the empirical method that constitutes a break with the more abstract Aristotelian method. Aristotle’s scientific conceptions used only a formal, speculative and non-empirical methodology. With the establishment of the scientific method, the Aristotelian paradigm that prevailed until then was broken. Galileo’s method is known as experimental induction. With Galileo, the study of nature took a different approach than Aristotle’s when science became more experimental than speculative.
1. The rise of the modern scientific method
Galileo was the first theoretician of the experimental method. For Galileo, the objective of the investigations must be knowledge of the law that presides over the phenomena. In addition, the main focus of science should be quantitative relationships. From 1623, Galileo Galilei founded modern science with the formulation of the scientific inductive method that is still used today. Because of this, Galileo is considered the “father of modern science”. The modern scientific method has its roots in two thinkers: Roger and Francis Bacon. Roger Bacon was the first to defend experimentation as a source of knowledge. Francis Bacon, however, was the one who ended up setting the basis for the modern scientific method.
Francis Bacon is considered one of the founders of modern science and is responsible for developing the empirical method of scientific research, where reason is subordinated to experimentation. Bacon proposes inductive reasoning, which goes from the particular to the general and where the purpose of the arguments is to lead to conclusions whose content is much broader than that of the premises on which they were based. The inductive method advocated by Francis Bacon considered data from sensory experience as bases of knowledge. Bacon’s new approach was strongly influenced by discoveries by scientists like Copernicus and Galileo Galilei that led him to propose a new approach to scientific research through inductive thinking as opposed to deductive thinking, that is, based on reason, which since Aristotle has predominated over the sciences.
The scientific method adopted modernly is attributed to René Descartes. It was in the work Discourse on the Method that René Descartes actually laid the foundations of the modern scientific method. Descartes transcends Francis Bacon’s thought by proposing an instrumentalization of nature, the mathematical and rational explanation of phenomena and things. The inductive thought proposed by Bacon leaves the scene to make way for the Cartesian deduction where the experiences serve only to confirm the general principles outlined by reason. According to René Descartes, the scientific method comprises two complementary approaches to knowledge: empirical (inductive) and rational (deductive). In the inductive approach, used in descriptive sciences such as biology, anatomy and geology, general principles are extracted from the analysis of data collected through observation and experimentation. In the deductive approach, employed in mathematics and theoretical physics, truths are derived from elementary principles. The inductive-deductive method was formulated in the 17th century by René Descartes.
In Discourse on the Method, his main work, Descartes expressed his disappointment with the knowledge of his time. Much of what he believed had turned out to be false. Descartes then decided to seek only the knowledge he could find within himself or in nature. He endeavored to find an irrefutable truth that would serve as an elementary principle of knowledge. René Descartes considered the mathematical method as the safest way to reach knowledge. Applying mathematical reasoning to philosophical problems, we can achieve the same certainty and clarity evidenced in geometry. The Cartesian deductive method perfectly complements Bacon’s inductive approach, which emphasizes observation and experimentation. The scientific achievements of modern times originated from the skillful synchronization of inductive and deductive methods.
Isaac Newton was the great synthesizer of the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon and Descartes, developing a mathematical formulation of the mechanistic conception of nature. From him the mechanistic or Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm was fully established. With regard to the scientific method, Newton adds the empirical-inductive method and the rationalist-analytical-deductive method, and goes further. Before Newton, two opposing tendencies guided science: 1) the empirical, inductive method, represented by Bacon; and, 2) the rational, inductive and deductive method, represented by Descartes. Bypassing Bacon in his systematic experimentation and Descartes in his mathematical analysis, Newton unified the two trends. Thus, the model of science that is in force up to the present moment was set up. It was Newton who brought Descartes’ dream to life by completing the Scientific Revolution.
2. The scientific methods used by the social sciences
In the social sciences, in addition to inductive, deductive, hypothetical-deductive methods, the dialectical method is also used, which is a way of analyzing social reality from the confrontation of theses, hypotheses or theories. Dialectics is the investigation through the opposition of conflicting elements and the understanding of the role of these elements in a phenomenon. The researcher must confront any concept taken as “truth” with other realities and theories to obtain a new conclusion, a new theory. Thus, the dialectic does not analyze the static object, but contextualizes the object of study in the historical, cultural and social dynamics. Dialectical argument was also used in metaphysics, being systematized by the German idealist thinker Friedrich Hegel, exponent of classical German philosophy, and developed, also, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Hegel identified three basic moments in the dialectical method: the thesis (a supposedly true idea), the antithesis (the contradiction or denial of that thesis) and the synthesis (the result of the confrontation of both ideas). The synthesis becomes a new thesis and the dialectic cycle begins anew.
The specific methods of the social sciences are: 1) the inductive that, from the occurrence of the phenomena, the laws and theories originate; 2) the deductive that, based on theories and laws, the occurrence of phenomena is interpreted; 3) the hypothetical-deductive that formulates hypotheses and tests the occurrence of their phenomena; 4) the dialectic that analyzes conflicting elements; 5) the historic that investigates the past to relate its influence on the phenomena of the present; 6) the comparative that is used to verify similarities and explain divergences; 7) the monographic that studies a certain group of factors to obtain generalizations; 8) the statistician whose objective is to analyze complex sets in order to establish the relationships between them and provide a quantitative description of this group under study; 9) the typological that serves as a model for carrying out analyzes and for understanding existing cases; 10) the functionalist who is a method of interpretation that aims to study a certain group through its system of organization; 11) the structuralist who is used to analyze the concrete reality of different phenomena; 12) the ethnographic that has as main focus the analysis of the cultural aspects of a determined group of society; and, 13) the clinician who is used in case studies and has psychopedagogical intervention with an intimate relationship between researcher and subject and can be of a qualitative or quantitative scope.
3. The questioning of the scientific method
Until the beginning of the 20th century, the scientific method based on the mechanistic model proposed by René Descartes in his Method Discourse predominated in science. Descartes ‘scientific method came to be questioned in the early twentieth century, after Einstein’s findings on relativity and Niels Bohr’s on quantum physics that challenged one of the fundamental precepts of Descartes’ mechanistic model. Einstein and Bohr’s findings proved the impossibility of determining even the reality of the results of an observation, overturning the precept that “to know the whole, just know the parts” by demonstrating that many phenomena have no explanation if not seen within a situation or system and, above all, they overturned the precept that the object is separate and independent from the observer, showing that what we know of what we believe to be the real object is only the result of our intervention in it and not the object itself. This new conception also showed the impossibility of structuring universal and absolute concepts since our own knowledge is limited, resulting in a change to a model where there are only probabilistic laws like those of Quantum Physics.
Descartes’ mechanistic model for a long time served the principles it proposed and enabled the development of several fields of science. However, the unsustainability of certain concepts that were considered fundamental by the Cartesian model has already been proven. When formulating the Theory of Complexity, Edgar Morin criticized Descartes’ mechanistic model when he affirmed that he produced a reductive thought hiding solidarities, inter-feedback systems, organizations, emergencies, totalities and raised unidimensional, fragmented and mutilated concepts containing the “errors and blindness” of knowledge. A clear example of these “errors and blindness” of scientific knowledge is not having mechanisms that allow the recognition of Uncertainty in its truths. Complexity Theory inherits the principle of uncertainty in scientific knowledge. “Chance” and “uncertainty”, therefore, constitute important categories of this theory and should be thought of as elements that inaugurate a new look at the direction of science in the context of the 21st century.
One of the issues that most afflicts the human being, no doubt, concerns the search for truth and, therefore, the validity of science. It is known that the scientist’s task is to delimit scientific laws and, for that, he must adopt a method. Since Francis Bacon, Science has followed the principle that in order to describe a law of nature, it is necessary to repeatedly test, collect and record the results, wait for this to be repeated with several other researchers before being considered valid. That is, a scientific law is valid when the scientific community, founded on particular experiences, reaps similar or supposedly equal results over and over again. It is customary to call an inference “inductive” if it goes from particular statements, or experiments, to universal statements, such as hypotheses or “theories”.
Karl Popper questions that it is possible to move from private statements to universals with the certainty of the truth. To begin solving the problem, advocates of induction understand that it is necessary to establish an Induction Principle, which can guarantee the process. For Popper, this is impossible or even superfluous, since this Principle does not guarantee anything since it is based on the same inconsistent method. To be valid, an Induction Principle should be universal and since the researcher always starts from the particular, this would not allow him to arrive logically at the universal, according to Popper.
To try to solve this problem, Popper established what he calls “the deductive test method”. To test a theory, Popper follows four steps, or types of evidence: 1st) Internal tests: seek the consistency of the conclusions drawn from the statement; 2nd) Tests of form: it consists of tests to know if the theory is, in fact, an empirical or scientific theory or merely tautology, that is, an analytical proposition that always remains true, since the attribute is a repetition of the subject; 3rd) Innovation tests: verification if the theory is really new or is already understood by others existing in the system; and, 4) Empirical tests: verification of the applicability of the conclusions drawn from the new theory. These are the main tests, as the theory can pass unscathed in the previous three steps and be shown to be false or be refuted in the last step by the empirical application of its conclusions, in which case the theory will not be considered valid.
For Karl Popper, the support of a theory is always provisional, since its conclusions will always be tested empirically. As long as the theory holds, no progress has been made. On the contrary, when a current theory passes the test of falsifiability, then science will evolve. In this sense, therefore, one must always seek to falsify the theory and not confirm it, also because the attempt to confirm it would be infinite, in time and space. Thus, Popper says that a theory will be more valid the more it is falsifiable, that is, the more there are possibilities to be refuted and, even so, it continues to respond to scientific problems. Once proposed, speculative theories will have to be proved rigorously and relentlessly by observation and experimentation. Theories that do not overcome observable and experimental evidence must be eliminated and replaced by other speculative conjectures.
According to Popper, Science progresses thanks to trial and error, conjectures and refutations. The method of science is the method of daring and ingenious conjectures followed by rigorous attempts to falsify them. Only the most apt theories survive. You can never lawfully say that a theory is true. It can be said with optimism that it is the best available, that it is better than any that existed before. According to falsifiability, it can be demonstrated that some theories are false using the results of observation and experimentation.
Popper, in trying to overthrow the inductive method, also created another problem, which is the need for a new criterion of demarcation between what is Science and what is not, because until then the inductive method was characteristic of Science and distinguished it from Metaphysics , the latter, known to be speculative. In other words, it is not limited, just by induction, what is and what is not science. Therefore, what marks the Science of non-science is the proof of falsifiability or refutation, as Popper says. Finally, for Popper, it is necessary that the statement be tested empirically, not for its verifiability, but for its falsifiability. In this way, the myth of scientific truth is evidenced, above all by the insufficiency of its methods, which should lead us to reflect on scientific solutions.
Bertrand Russell was concerned with examining, in the same way as David Hume, whether the repetition of a phenomenon, in a given number of experiences in the past, constitutes a guarantee of its subsequent occurrence in the future. Russell asked two other questions: (a) are past experiences the source of our future expectations? (b) How to justify such expectations? Russell asks: Does finding a certain number of instances of a law being satisfied in the past provide evidence that the same law will continue to be satisfied in the future? Russell maintains that as the same events are repeated, their occurrence in the future will become more likely. Therefore, his argument is inclined to replace the justification of induction with the justification of the probability of induction. Our experience with nature has demonstrated so far, Russell tells us (here in strict accordance with Hume), that the frequent repetition of a succession or coexistence of events has been the reason for us to expect that the succession or coexistence of events continues to occur in the future. What Russell, therefore, is discussing is the pertinence or not of our conviction about the permanent regularity between past and future, which is based on the realization that the future has continuously turned into a past, having always ended up being similar to the past. Russell says that deductive reasoning does not effectively give us the possibility of formulating predictions about future occurrences, as their statements necessarily derive from already established generalizations.
Pierre Duhem, a French physicist and historian of science, says that science, far from being able to prove its claims by means of a logical derivation of self-evident principles, has as its method to derive empirical predictions from its theories and compare them with what is observed. By this method, however, no theory can be definitively established, since it is always possible that more than one theory satisfactorily fits the empirical data. That is, for any set of observational data, an indefinite number of theories may be suitable for it. Duhem says that the experimental method cannot transform a physics hypothesis into an indisputable truth because one can never be sure that all imaginable hypotheses that can apply to a group of phenomena have been exhausted.
In turn, Henri Poincaré, mathematician, physicist and philosopher of French science and Albert Einstein, German theoretical physicist, despite the significant differences of their respective philosophies of scientific knowledge had in common the belief that scientific ideas, in the elaboration of physical theories and mathematical, are constructs free of thought. In this sense, they understood that they are not induced in a logical and univocal, necessary and compulsory way, based on the data of experience and, moreover, that they are not inscribed in an innate or a priori structure of thought. It is in this space of freedom that the idea of creation enters scientific work that leads to discovery. In the clearest way, Poincaré and Einstein, both insisted on this aspect that was, for them, the most important characteristic of the activity of knowledge, and that was effectively located at the center of their epistemologies.
According to Henri Poincaré, science can teach us nothing about the truth, it can only serve as a rule of action. In this perspective, science would be nothing more than a rule of action, as we would be powerless to know whatever and, however, how we need to act we set rules. It is the set of these rules that we call science. Almost all contemporary philosophers of science have come to the conclusion that science cannot literally describe an unobservable world of microscopic particles and intangible waves. And a significant number of philosophers of science have come to the conclusion that science cannot succeed in this goal since it is beyond the reach of human perception.
In his work Against the method, the Austrian Paul Feyerabend claims that there is no universal scientific method criticizing openly the scientific method. According to its epistemology, science is an anarchic enterprise. It rejects the existence of universal rules and defends the violation of these methodological rules. He states that the advance of science occurs when violating the methodological rules imposed. The epistemological anarchism that he defends must be understood as a defense of an epistemological pluralism, that is, against a unique method of doing science. It defends an “all-worth”, that is, a radical methodological pluralism. Its epistemology states that no theory can be consistent with all the facts and that there cannot be a set of rules that will lead to scientific progress. Feyerabend openly defends the counter-rule, that is, if the rule is induction, counter-induction should be used, which focuses on the acceptance of alternative hypotheses. According to Feyerabend’s view, all theories are fallible in nature. It proposes the following counter-measures: (a) introducing hypotheses that conflict with the observations; (b) introducing hypotheses that do not fit the established theories. Theories should always be seen as approximations, and never as definitions. One cannot reach the truth, but only approach it.
4. In search of a new scientific method
All the questions presented in chapter 3 about the Cartesian-based scientific method demonstrate the need for changes in order to be successful in the search for scientific truth. From the above, it can be concluded that it is necessary to incorporate Karl Popper’s proposal in order to verify whether the theory to be proven is refuted or not by the empirical application of his conclusions. It is necessary to answer the question posed by Bertrand Russell if a law being satisfied in the past provides evidence that the same law will continue to be satisfied in the future and to evaluate what he proposes to replace the induction test with the induction probability test. It is necessary to consider the opinion of Pierre Duhem that the experimental method cannot transform a physics hypothesis into an indisputable truth because one can never be sure that all imaginable hypotheses that can apply to a group of phenomena have been exhausted. it is necessary to take into account the opinions of Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein who considered that scientific ideas, in the elaboration of physical and mathematical theories, are constructions free from thought and that it is in this space of freedom that creation occurs in scientific work that leads to discovery . It is necessary to admit the thesis of Henri Poincaré who stated that science can teach us nothing about the truth only by serving as a rule of action. It is necessary to consider the opinion of Feyerabend, who defends the thesis that all theories are fallible in nature, that they should be seen as approximations because the truth cannot be reached and that counter-induction should be used to prove the results of the induction. The scientific community urgently needs to debate the changes required for the scientific method
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* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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