On his book The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey
Cover Interview of July 07, 2021
In a nutshell
What the book is all about is right there in the title!
Well, sort of.
The book isn’t about the scientific method—since it
starts by pointing out that there’s no such thing. Scientists already know
this: if you try to reduce science to a single set of steps, the result will
either be too narrow (leaving out scientific fields that do things a bit
differently) or too broad (including approaches that nobody thinks are
scientific). Science is too big (and too diverse) to boil down to a method
shared across specialties but limited to science alone.
What the book is about is the idea of a single,
shared scientific method. Specifically, it offers a history of the five-step
method that is still taught in classrooms around the world—anchored by asking a
question and then testing hypothetical answers to it.
The historian of education, John Rudolph, has shown how
these steps were copied into science textbooks from the work of John Dewey—with
a twist. While Dewey saw his steps as something science shared with everyday
thinking, others seized on them as a way to set science apart from other ways
of knowing. The rest, as they say, is history.
I set out to see where Dewey’s steps came from. What I found
was a nesting series of debates, from Dewey’s study of children and stretching
backward through experiments on animals to the work of Charles Darwin almost a
century earlier.
The story I tell in The Scientific Method is about
how the lines between the human and natural worlds, and specifically between
human and animal minds, got blurred over the nineteenth century. All this
blurring led to Dewey’s search for a natural history of thinking, shared by any
organism with a mind.
The fact that this project ultimately produced, in the hands
of others, an account of human-specific scientific reasoning—and not the
naturalistic project Dewey had planned—is ironic, if not tragic.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
What the book is all about is right there in the title! Well, sort of.
The book isn’t about the scientific method—since it starts by pointing out that there’s no such thing. Scientists already know this: if you try to reduce science to a single set of steps, the result will either be too narrow (leaving out scientific fields that do things a bit differently) or too broad (including approaches that nobody thinks are scientific). Science is too big (and too diverse) to boil down to a method shared across specialties but limited to science alone.
What the book is about is the idea of a single, shared scientific method. Specifically, it offers a history of the five-step method that is still taught in classrooms around the world—anchored by asking a question and then testing hypothetical answers to it.
The historian of education, John Rudolph, has shown how these steps were copied into science textbooks from the work of John Dewey—with a twist. While Dewey saw his steps as something science shared with everyday thinking, others seized on them as a way to set science apart from other ways of knowing. The rest, as they say, is history.
I set out to see where Dewey’s steps came from. What I found was a nesting series of debates, from Dewey’s study of children and stretching backward through experiments on animals to the work of Charles Darwin almost a century earlier.
The story I tell in The Scientific Method is about how the lines between the human and natural worlds, and specifically between human and animal minds, got blurred over the nineteenth century. All this blurring led to Dewey’s search for a natural history of thinking, shared by any organism with a mind.
The fact that this project ultimately produced, in the hands of others, an account of human-specific scientific reasoning—and not the naturalistic project Dewey had planned—is ironic, if not tragic.