Is There a Scientific Method?

Modern science relies largely on method or, rather, on the claim that by employing a systematic, impersonal method, human reasoning can transcend the mind’s subjective experience of reality and discover the true, external causes of experience. In the early stages of modern science’s emergence out of medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy, Francis Bacon argued that this method was to be based on induction and experiment, without a priori mental input and with a minimum of mathematics. Rene Descartes argued that the required method was to be based on deduction, mathematics, and a priori and innate ideas, with a minimum of experiment. For Descartes, experiment served primarily as a check on deductive reasoning; for Bacon, experiment was a source of knowledge and constrained our inductive reasoning about empirical facts. Despite their differing styles, Descartes and Bacon together concretized the idea that a systematic method of reasoning could give us knowledge of the world.