Method

Scientific method

Overview

The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge through careful observation, rigorous skepticism, hypothesis testing, and experimental validation. Developed from ancient and medieval practices, it acknowledges that cognitive assumptions can distort the interpretation of the observation. The scientific method has characterized science since at least the 17th century. Scientific inquiry includes creating a testable hypothesis through inductive reasoning, testing it through experiments and statistical analysis, and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.

Although procedures vary across fields, the underlying process is often similar. In more detail: the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), predicting the logical consequences of hypothesis, then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions. A hypothesis is a conjecture based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question. Hypotheses can be very specific or broad but must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.

While the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, it actually represents a set of general principles. Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (nor to the same degree), and they are not always in the same order. Numerous discoveries have not followed the textbook model of the scientific method, and, in some cases, chance has played a role.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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The method now under consideration is called the Empirical Method; and in order to estimate it fairly, we must suppose it to be completely, not incompletely, empirical. We must exclude from it every thing which partakes of the nature not of an experimental but of a deductive operation.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Scientific method is; the author is tied to Scientific method in the knowledge graph.
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Every important advance in scientific method means better agencies, more skilled technique for simply detaching and describing what is barely there, or given. To be able to find out what can safely be taken as _there_, as given in any particular inquiry, and hence be taken as material for orderly and verifiable inference, for fruitful hypothesis-making, for entertaining of…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
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But the true inductive method was not discovered by Bacon, and the true method of science is something which includes deduction as much as induction, logic and mathematics as much as botany and geology. I shall not attempt the difficult task of stating what the scientific method is, but I will try to indicate the temper of mind out of which the scientific method grows, which is the second of the two merits that were…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
States what Scientific method is; names Scientific method twice.
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Scientific method

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