Nice. I would have liked to have seen more fleshing out of the reasons for his particular assertions and categorizations… such as the necessity of positing causal agents, the grounding of cause-and-effect (why is cause-and-effect a necessary component of any explanation?) as well as how do we know that the method is complete, that there aren’t things that we may have overlooked to include.
Prediction is raised in the comments section but there is an easy answer to this - his method actually already includes prediction, it’s just not obvious. Prediction and explanation are both two sides of the same coin. If you can explain something, that means you can give a reason for it. What does it mean to “give a reason”? Well, it means that you can represent the phenomena under study with less information than would be required to give every particular. To put it into 21st century language, valid generalizations compress the data of particulars.
We can think of the hypothesis as a compression algorithm which allows us to represent the particulars in the much smaller form of generalities. Compression connects explanation and prediction. Explanation is a compression algorithm run forward, prediction is a compression algorithm run in reverse.
He is missing discussion of the feedback of the scientific method into itself. This feedback process is heavily distorted in mainstream science. Today, we treat the scientific method as a high-stakes game of monopoly tournament where the best scientific hypothesis completely wipes out all others and sucks up all the oxygen in the room and receives 99.999% of all available funding. Look at modern cosmology which is in a dramatically bad state of affairs. We have a pantheon of metaphysical absurdities parading around the cosmos in full naked glory while everyone who is wise enough to see them is supposed to pretend that The Cosmology is not, in fact, naked. Black holes with infinite density at a single geometric point? Elementary particles with infinite forces at their centers? Dark matter and dark energy that supposedly comprise 95% of all matter in the Universe??? Seriously?? 95% of all matter in the Universe is something which is non-observable except as it influences other matter through the force of gravity. This is religion, not science.
But there is a viable alternative which has been around for more than half a decade and sits neglected on the shelf of plausible scientific cosmological theories that didn’t win the Grand Tournament of Peer Review and Government Grant Funding. It is called Plasma Cosmology, first put forward by physicist Hannes Alfven. Rather than investigating this and other alternatives, modern science plunges headlong into the abyss of metaphysical gibberish, throwing around infinities by saying “they’re only in the limit and we choose to neglect the limit” and black holes supposedly popping into existence unobservably all around us like so many demons and goblins. This is religion, not science.
If you want to read an examplary of the scientific method, I recommend you take a look at Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics. He weaves together the process of hypothesization, theorization, observation and feedback into a seamless process that will make you cry when you compare it to the pathetic excuse for a science that is called “physics” today. Read the section where he carefully and perspicuously he goes through the reasons why the lever principle is true! Today, you are lucky if a single line of a physics textbook is given to explaining the equation: FD = fd. I guess they just assume you’ve read Mach even though they don’t cite him. Read the section where he gives the limit argument for conservation of momentum… in physics class, I was taught that Newton just imagined something moving through empty Cartesian space and said “Aha! It would have no reason to come to rest so, therefore, it must continue on forever” and this is supposed to be the reason we today accept the conservation of momentum. Not so. Mach explains how the conservation of momentum is the inescapable conclusion of real experiment combined with thought-experimental continuation of the real experiment to its limit! It’s truly mind-blowing!
Just from the Introduction… how often do you read something like this in a modern scientific textbook??:
An instinctive, irreflective knowledge of the processes instinctive knowledge of nature will doubtless always precede the scientific, conscious apprehension, or investigation, of phenomena. The former is the outcome of the relation in which the processes of nature stand to the satisfaction of our wants. The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone : it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
Clayton -