Method
Trial and error
Overview
Trial and error is a fundamental method of problem-solving characterized by repeated, varied attempts which are continued until success, or until the practitioner stops trying.
According to W.H. Thorpe, the term was devised by C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) after trying out similar phrases "trial and failure" and "trial and practice". However, the phrase 'trial and error' was already in use in 1833, where it can be found in the book title "Practical Methods by Trial and Error for Finding the Latitude and Time at Sea". Under Morgan's Canon, animal behaviour should be explained in the simplest possible way. Where behavior seems to imply higher mental processes, it might be explained by trial-and-error learning. An example is the skillful way in which his terrier Tony opened the garden gate, easily misunderstood as an insightful act by someone seeing the final behavior. Lloyd Morgan, however, had watched and recorded the series of approximations by which the dog had gradually learned the response, and could demonstrate that no insight was required to explain it.
Edward Lee Thorndike was the initiator of the theory of trial and error learning based on the findings he showed how to manage a trial-and-error experiment in the laboratory. In his famous experiment, a cat was placed in a series of puzzle boxes to study the law of effect in learning. He plotted to learn curves which recorded the timing for each trial. Thorndike's key observation was that learning was promoted by positive results, which was later refined and extended by B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning.
Trial and error is also a method of problem solving, repair, tuning, or obtaining knowledge. In the field of computer science, the method is called generate and test (brute force). In elementary algebra, when solving equations, it is called guess and check.
This approach can be seen as one of the two basic approaches to problem-solving, contrasted with an approach using insight and theory. However, there are intermediate methods that, for example, use theory to guide the method, an approach known as guided empiricism.
This way of thinking has become a mainstay of Karl Popper's critical rationalism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
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. If, for instance, we try experiments with mercury upon a person in health, in order to ascertain the general laws of its action upon…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Trial and error is.
The method of trial and error or success is likely, if not directed by a trained and informed imagination, to score an undue proportion of failures. There is no possibility of disguising the fact that an experimental philosophy of life means a hit-and-miss philosophy in the end. But it means missing rather than hitting, if the aiming is done in a happy-go-lucky way instead of by bringing to bear all the resources of…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
Opens on Trial and error; names Trial and error.
It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience. Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can never take into account all the…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Names Trial and error several times.
Philosophers who discussed Trial and error
Related ideas
- Operant conditioning
- Insight
- Neologism
- Karl Popper
- Knowledge
- Recursion
- Scientific method
- Theory
- Critical rationalism
- B. F. Skinner
- Computer science
- DNA
- Evolution
- Jean Piaget
Place in the tradition
Part of Behaviorism.