The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.
By scientific method I would mean something on a far more general level than details about circulation of preprints.
Architecture varies, but the structural mechanics that describes how buildings stay up is the same always and everywhere.
The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.