Pros And Cons Of Scientific Enquiry

At the core of the current proposal is conception that, the human brain being is an abductive inferential apparatus and scientific progress should also be through an abductive process. Call for abductive reasoning in scientific discovery was pioneered by C.S. Pierse and later by Norwood R Hanson. Hanson (1958) characterize abductive argument as having three schema, one, an abductive argument starts with a surprising phenomena being encountered. Two, the surprising event will be no longer surprising when a hypothesis is formed, which can explain the surprising event. Third, the new hypothesis will be incorporated into their later observation (Jutta, 2014). The abductive mode of discovery starts with an anomalous observation, which in turn

Drawing from Hanson's view of scientific enquiry, I posit that the scientific enquiry starts with an anomaly, which is a surprising phenomena that is unaccounted by your existing world view. On the contrary, the conventional methods in scientific enquiry starts with the prediction from a theory that the scientist intend to falsify or corroborate. Thus, when the anomaly is detected, it should lead to the formulation of hypothesis that reduces the surprise. This is analogous to the prediction-error minimization done by the brain. The hypothesis that “best explains” the phenomenon will be part of the new “model of the world”. This does not mean that other hypothesis are rejected, instead, they are

According to Friston (2013), prediction error minimization can be achieved in two ways, “it (brain) can either change its predictions to better cohere with sensory input, or change the sampling of the environment such that sensory samples conform to predictions. The former process corresponds to perceptual inference and the latter to action: together, they constitute active inference”. Thus I propose, the demarcation (good versus bad hypothesis) can be acheived by the proximity of the hypothesis with the act of testing. For example, the hypothesis that the the roots of a tree grow towards the water source is highly proximal to the act of testing (that is, observing the patterns of root growth and water source). If one makes the hypothesis that constellations can influence the fate of people on earth, it is bad hypothesis because it is not proximal to the act of testing. The current framework solves the problem of demarcation through hypthesis-to-action proximity. Caution must be taken that, here, it is not the theory that is demarcated as good or bad, instead it is the hypothesis. In this framework, the validity of the theory is not