This concluding part of the article on Scientific Method from Baldwins Dictionary, by Peirce and Baldwin, seems apropos here.
gary f. (2) The most vital factors in the method of modern science have not been the following of this or that logical prescription although these have had their value too but they have been the moral factors. First of these has been the genuine love of truth and conviction that nothing else could long endure. Given that men strive after the truth, and, in the nature of things, they will get it in a measure. The greatest difference between the scientific state of the modern scientific era from Copernicus and the middle ages, is that now the whole concern of students is to find out the truth; while then it was to put into a rational light the faith of which they were already possessed. The chief obstacle to the advance of science among students of science in the modern era has been that they were teachers, and feared the effect of this or that theory. But the salvation from this danger has been the fact that there was no vast institution which anybody for a moment hoped could withstand the mighty tide of fact. The next most vital factor of the method of modern science is that it has been made social. On the one hand, what a scientific man recognizes as a fact of science must be something open to anybody to observe, provided he fulfils the necessary conditions, external and internal. As long as only one man has been able to see a marking upon the planet Venus, it is not an established fact. Ghost stories and all that cannot become the subject of genuine science until they can in some way be welded to ordinary experience. On the other hand, the method of modern science is social in respect to the solidarity of its efforts. The scientific world is like a colony of insects, in that the individual strives to produce that which he himself cannot hope to enjoy. One generation collects premises in order that a distant generation may discover what they mean. When a problem comes before the scientific world, a hundred men immediately set all their energies to work upon it. One contributes this, another that. Another company, standing upon the shoulders of the first, strike a little higher, until at last the parapet is attained. Still another moral factor of the method of science, perhaps even more vital than the last, is the self-confidence of it. In order to appreciate this, it is to be remembered that the entire fabric of science has to be built up out of surmises at truth. All that experiment can do is to tell us when we have surmised wrong. The right surmise is left for us to produce. The ancient world under these circumstances, with the exception of a few men born out of their time, looked upon physics as something about which only vague surmises could be made, and upon which close study would be thrown away. So, venturing nothing, they naturally could gain nothing. But modern science has never faltered in its confidence that it would ultimately find out the truth concerning any question in which it could apply the check of experiment. From: Frederik Stjernfelt [mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk] Sent: 8-Sep-14 4:39 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee; Peirce List Subject: [biosemiotics:6710] Re: Side issue: science Dear Stan, Howard, list I certainly agree with Howard here. My emphasis on the "chain of reasoning" in recent list discussions may have given some a wrong impression of my position. Again, the reason for this emphasis was to claim that the overall process of knowledge-acquisition in a broad sense comes before any of the single aspects gradually acquired by that process during evolution. So the "chain of reasoning", on a Peircean view, involves all sorts of abductions - including Howard's open attitudes, thought experiments, imaginations, more or less educated guesses, pattern matchings, associations, analogies, metaphors, toyings with pictures and diagrams, synaesthetic couplings, Peircean "play of musement" etc. - all possible ways leading to the articulation of new hypotheses to be subsequently tested by de- and inductions. Best F Den 08/09/2014 kl. 22.11 skrev Howard Pattee <hpat...@roadrunner.com> : At 10:06 AM 9/8/2014, Stan wrote: Scientific reasoning is a matter of concentrated focus, while poetic musing is an unfocused search among (verbal) possibilities, an opening up. HP: Philosophers often pigeonhole science with reasoning and this is misleading. It is true that "scientific reasoning" may be used at the end of discovery, usually checking the math. Unfortunately, bad curricula emphasize logic and reasoning as the "scientific method." As Poincaré, Peirce, Polanyi, and others emphasize, science is not fairly characterized by such methods but rather by a detached open attitudetoward the search for meaning. Einstein's elusive, "intuitive searching for the meaning of facts" (ein intuitives Heranführen an die Tatsachen) is not unlike the poet's "unfocused search among conceptual possibilities. But because scientists' search for meaning seldom depends on words, their thinking is often inscrutable. Aesthetics always plays a generative role (e.g., simplicity, symmetry, invariance, clarity, generality, etc.) "Three things have been established beyond reasonable doubt: the power of intellectual beauty to reveal truth about nature; the vital importance of distinguishing this beauty from merely formal attractiveness; and the delicacy of the test between them, so difficult that it may baffle the most penetrating scientific minds." [Polanyi] Howard
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