Science without method

Galileo and his followers discovered, and subsequent centuries have amply confirmed, that you get much better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles blindly bumping each other than by thinking of them as Aristotle thought of them – animistically, ideologically, anthromorphically. They also discovered that you get a better handle on the universe by thinking of it as infinite and cold and comfortless than by thinking of it as finite, homey, planned, and relevant to human concerns. Finally, they discovered that if you view planets or missiles or corpuscles as point-masses, you can get nice simple predictive laws by looking for nice simple mathematical ratios. These discoveries are the basis of modern technological civilization. We can hardly be too grateful for them. But they do not, pace Descartes and Kant, point any epistemological moral. They do not tell us anything about the nature of science or rationality. In particular, they were not due to the use of, nor do they exemplify, something called ‘the scientific method.’

The tradition we call ‘modern philosophy’ asked itself ‘How is it that science has had so much success? What is the secret of this success?’ The various bad answers to these bad questions have been variations on a single charming but uncashable metaphor: viz. the New Science discovered the language which nature itself uses.