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A Beginner's Guide to Scientific Method

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The scientific method consists of (1) posing the intitial defining question of the investigation, (2) exploring the subject of the defining question, (3) formulating alternative hypotheses, (4) testing the hypotheses, and (5) posing a follow-up question if the defining question has not yet been satisfactorily answered. Carey's book is helpful only in step 4: it provides basic guidance for testing assertions. It also includes discussion of different kinds of explanation. It was written for non-technical beginning college students; it would also be suitable for high school students as yuoung as age 15. It is not, however, really an introduction to the scientific method; the reader should have some familiarity with the scientific method before reading this book.

This book provides you with excellent step-by-step examples in applying the scientific method to everyday life situations. It gives you the tools to assess the validity of scientific claims and to guard yourself against the weird and the pseudoscientific ones.

The numerous examples allow you to practice and sharpen your skills and give you an excellent idea how the scientific mind works (or should work).

Accessible to the average reader.

AC.CHB

This is a practical guide to recognizing and evaluating reported results of experimental science. Carey does not deal with philosophy of science. Rather, he builds a vocabulary for distinguishing kinds of experiments and evaluating their results. He offers criteria for distinguishing scientific theories from non-scientific ones.

Carey includes innovative exercises that introduce students to the creative difficulties in discovering solutions to problems in science.

This book provides an excellent introduction to the nature of scientific method. Science is basically what the scientific method is, but most people have no idea how it actually works. This book will give you a better understanding of how scientists actually go about their work. The author does a fine job of explaining scientific methods and procedures in easily understandable language, without getting too technical. I learned a lot from this book. Here are some of the things that I learned, combined with some of my previous reading, relating to how to distinguish good science from false science, and what distinguishes a good theory from a not so good theory:

Recently, I got into a discussion with someone about scientific theories and "scientific truth." This person probably wasn't very knowledgeable about science or scientific method, based on what they said, since they maintained that science is just based on assumptions, and that if your assumptions differ, your conclusions differ. If you know something about science and scientific method, however, you know that this is not the case. I went to the trouble of providing a detailed response on this issue, and much of that information came from this book, so I thought I would include it here, since there seems to be a good deal of misunderstanding among the general public about science and scientific explanation.

Much of the information comes from this book, and some of it comes from other reading.

Contrary to what this person said, validity and "truth" in science is based on a number of considerations, including:

1. The amount of, degree of accuracy, and overall preponderance of the data for both empirical and experimentally derived observations.

2. Whether the theory explains the data or observations better than competing theories.

3. Whether the theory yields testable results.

4. Whether the theory makes valid predictions.

5. Whether the theory is more complete, or just simpler and more efficient than competing explanations. Also known as "Occam's razor."

6. Whether the theory is productive in terms of multiple additional hypotheses (also related to the "heuristic" criterion I mentioned below).

7. Whether the theory is amenable to experimental validation and testing.

8. Whether the experiments yield repeatable and repeatedly consistent rather than inconsistent results.

There are other more technical criteria that I could mention too, that I won't go into here for the sake of simplicity, such as:

1. Whether the theory has close coupling between the mathematico-deductive and empirico-inductive components of the theory and/or constituent hypotheses.

2. Whether the theory is heuristically useful or valuable. In other words, whether it leads to other useful research or results.

3. Deterministic or probabilistic nature of the theory and/or evidence. In other words, the type of causation involved.

4. The degree of current validation and support for the theory and the type of validation and support (also related to my previous comments on preponderance of the data and deterministic vs. probabilistic causation).

5. Whether the theory easily yields mathematical or quantitative models or systems. Also whether the data are easily quantifiable or measurable.

6. If the theory is based on statistical evidence, whether the experiments follow accepted standards for experimental design, or accepted standards of data acquisition and gathering, as the case of "quasi-experimental" methods.

7. Whether the experiments follow the uniformitarian principle of probabilitistic causality (related to number 6, above). In other words, under similar conditions, similar causes produce similar effects.

8. Methodological considerations, such as whether the type of scientific methodology the theory uses is historical or non-historical in nature. Technically, this means whether the theory uses the non-historical method of deductive prediction of future events from known, present causes, vs. inductive inference of ancient causes from their historical results.

A lot of my discussion above is also covered very clearly in this book, and better than I was able to explain it in many ways. :-) Anyway, I hope you found my little digression a useful in further your knowledge of how science goes about its work.

This book was useful for my college course of natural science. It's relatively short, which makes for a quick read. Nonetheless, it has some good information and some fun quizzes in it.

The book doesn't go into philosophy of science and is very clear and easy to read. It emphasizes things that are common to scientific investigation in general like making observations and measurements, looking for explanations, using explanations to make predictions, testing those predictions with experiments and the kinds of considerations (like sample size, confounding variables and bias) and the kinds of studies (randomized, prospective and retrospective) used to establish causal links. The last chapter talked about how false anomalies can be used to make unfounded claims by leaving out key facts that aren't known by the average person. This is a common practice of cholesterol skeptics. Once these facts are known the anomaly disappears. Scientific Thinking by Robert M. Martin is also a good book on scientific method that goes into more depth.

Try reading the book first. I know this probably seems like a ridiculously quaint notion, but you might learn something and spare the rest of us the trouble of reading hollow, unsubstantiated rants.