---
title: "Scientific method"
chunk: 11/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:43:09.265477+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Scientific pluralism is a position within the philosophy of science that rejects various proposed unities of scientific method and subject matter. Scientific pluralists hold that science is not unified in one or more of the following ways: the metaphysics of its subject matter, the epistemology of scientific knowledge, or the research methods and models that should be used. Some pluralists believe that pluralism is necessary due to the nature of science. Others say that since scientific disciplines already vary in practice, there is no reason to believe this variation is wrong until a specific unification is empirically proven. Finally, some hold that pluralism should be allowed for normative reasons, even if unity were possible in theory.

=== Unificationism ===

Unificationism, in science, was a central tenet of logical positivism. Different logical positivists construed this doctrine in several different ways, e.g. as a reductionist thesis, that the objects investigated by the special sciences reduce to the objects of a common, putatively more basic domain of science, usually thought to be physics; as the thesis that all theories and results of the various sciences can or ought to be expressed in a common language or "universal slang"; or as the thesis that all the special sciences share a common scientific method.
Development of the idea has been troubled by accelerated advancement in technology that has opened up many new ways to look at the world.

The fact that the standards of scientific success shift with time does not only make the philosophy of science difficult; it also raises problems for the public understanding of science. We do not have a fixed scientific method to rally around and defend.

=== Epistemological anarchism ===

Paul Feyerabend examined the history of science, and was led to deny that science is genuinely a methodological process. In his 1975 book Against Method he argued that no description of scientific method could possibly be broad enough to include all the approaches and methods used by scientists, and that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science. In essence, he said that for any specific method or norm of science, one can find a historic episode where violating it has contributed to the progress of science. He jokingly suggested that, if believers in the scientific method wish to express a single universally valid rule, it should be 'anything goes'. As has been argued before him however, this is uneconomic; problem solvers, and researchers are to be prudent with their resources during their inquiry.
A more general inference against formalised method has been found through research involving interviews with scientists regarding their conception of method. This research indicated that scientists frequently encounter difficulty in determining whether the available evidence supports their hypotheses. This reveals that there are no straightforward mappings between overarching methodological concepts and precise strategies to direct the conduct of research.

=== Education ===

In science education, the idea of a general and universal scientific method has been notably influential, and numerous studies (in the US) have shown that this framing of method often forms part of both students' and teachers' conception of science. This convention of traditional education has been argued against by scientists, as there is a consensus that educations' sequential elements and unified view of scientific method do not reflect how scientists actually work. Major organizations of scientists such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) consider the sciences to be a part of the liberal arts traditions of learning and proper understating of science includes understanding of philosophy and history, not just science in isolation.
How the sciences make knowledge has been taught in the context of "the" scientific method (singular) since the early 20th century. Various systems of education, including but not limited to the US, have taught the method of science as a process or procedure, structured as a definitive series of steps: observation, hypothesis, prediction, experiment.
This version of the method of science has been a long-established standard in primary and secondary education, as well as the biomedical sciences. It has long been held to be an inaccurate idealisation of how some scientific inquiries are structured.
Traditional science education faced criticism for presenting an oversimplified, singular methodology that overemphasized experimentation, ignored social context, and suggested automatic knowledge generation through procedural steps.
The scientific method no longer features in the standards for US education of 2013 (NGSS) that replaced those of 1996 (NRC). They, too, influenced international science education, and the standards measured for have shifted since from the singular hypothesis-testing method to a broader conception of scientific methods. These scientific methods, which are rooted in scientific practices and not epistemology, are described as the 3 dimensions of scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts (interdisciplinary ideas), and disciplinary core ideas.
The scientific method, as a result of simplified and universal explanations, is often held to have reached a kind of mythological status; as a tool for communication or, at best, an idealisation. Education's approach was heavily influenced by John Dewey's, How We Think (1910). Van der Ploeg (2016) indicated that Dewey's views on education had long been used to further an idea of citizen education removed from "sound education", claiming that references to Dewey in such arguments were undue interpretations (of Dewey).

=== Sociology of knowledge ===

The sociology of knowledge is a concept in the discussion around scientific method, claiming the underlying method of science to be sociological. King explains that sociology distinguishes here between the system of ideas that govern the sciences through an inner logic, and the social system in which those ideas arise.