Goldman's Arguments Against The Scientific Method Analysis

It is likely that we were all taught some form of the scientific method during general science classes in our childhood. We can also see how the scientific method is applied during our encounter with basic scientific laws, such as laws of mechanics or electricity. The method, hypothetico-deductivism follows: One invents a hypothesis and produce and observational statement. One then checks if these statements turn out to be true, and if so, one is said to have evidence for one’s hypothesis. If the statement turns out to be false, then the hypothesis is refuted .

However, with the advent of the 20th century, scientists have produced conjectures and hypotheses without the ability due to various limitation, especially technological limitations

Hume’s problem of induction tells us that we are unable to know if a scientific claim, formed from inductive reasoning, is true . Because science often follow a pragmatic theory of truth, whereby a proposition is true if it is useful, and science have produced mostly useful results, we can assume without delving into arguments about pragmatism, that the scientific method is reliable. Thus, following Goldman’s process reliabilism, a scientist is justified in his claims if he uses the scientific method. One caveat is that if evidence uncovered objects to the claims made, despite using a reliable method, the belief is a false

A form of the scientific method was given above and it seems that although scientists do not follow it rigidly, they still operate largely in that structure. However, Percy Bridgman would argue otherwise. He argues that ‘no working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific’ . If a scientist is unconcerned with the method he uses, or that science is what scientist do and there is no one scientific method, then it is difficult to tell if a scientific method used by a scientist is reliable.

Perhaps we could argue that all scientific methods are reliable. Any way a scientist conducts science, it is always reliable as it will always produce a true belief (following a pragmatic theory of truth). One counter-example is Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion. Fleishmann and Pons were chemists that claimed that they have discovered fusion produced in the test-tube. Both men were scientist working on a scientific hypothesis of cold fusion. However, it is clear that their scientific method used was unreliable, as many scientists could not replicate their experiment due to their careless experimentation techniques