A.3 Scientific Method

Bacon's Novum Organum sets out the inductive program, difficult reading but historically load-bearing. Popper's falsifiability criterion, from The Logic of Scientific Discovery and the more accessible Conjectures and Refutations, answers a real problem with induction: no finite run of confirmations proves a theory, but a single disconfirming case can refute one. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions complicates this: normal science operates inside a paradigm, and anomalies accumulate for a long time before anything is abandoned. Feyerabend's Against Method pushes further, arguing that no single rule reliably describes how science has actually proceeded. Okasha's Very Short Introduction is a compact way to hold these positions against each other. Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics (written roughly 1028 to 1038) used controlled experiments, including a camera obscura, to decide between rival theories of vision. It is a strong early case of experimental method, six centuries before Bacon, though calling him the inventor of the scientific method overstates it. The standard objection to naive falsificationism is Duhem and Quine's point that a theory is never tested alone; auxiliary assumptions travel with it, so a failed prediction can be blamed on those instead of the theory. The contrast is instructive: an anomaly in Uranus's orbit led to the discovery of Neptune, while a structurally similar anomaly in Mercury's orbit led nineteenth-century astronomers to posit a nonexistent planet, Vulcan, before general relativity explained the discrepancy directly. Design an experiment yourself: take an everyday claim, state what result would refute it, and specify a control condition before running anything. Poskett's Horizons, introduced on the reading track in section III, is the companion history to read alongside this material across the next several phases. B.2 returns to these questions in modern form, where the evidence is statistical and the failure mode is replication rather than a single refuting observation.