---
title: "History of scientific method"
chunk: 10/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:43:10.599999+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In the late 19th century, Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a schema that would turn out to have considerable influence in the further development of scientific method generally.  Peirce's work quickly accelerated the progress on several fronts. Firstly, speaking in broader context in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), Peirce outlined an objectively verifiable method to test the truth of putative knowledge on a way that goes beyond mere foundational alternatives, focusing upon both Deduction and Induction.  He thus placed induction and deduction in a complementary rather than competitive context (the latter of which had been the primary trend at least since David Hume a century before).  Secondly, and of more direct importance to scientific method, Peirce put forth the basic schema for hypothesis-testing that continues to prevail today.  Extracting the theory of inquiry from its raw materials in classical logic, he refined it in parallel with the early development of symbolic logic to address the then-current problems in scientific reasoning. Peirce examined and articulated the three fundamental modes of reasoning that play a role in scientific inquiry today, the processes that are currently known as abductive, deductive, and inductive inference.  Thirdly, he played a major role in the progress of symbolic logic itself – indeed this was his primary specialty.
Charles S. Peirce was also a pioneer in statistics. Peirce held that science achieves statistical probabilities, not certainties, and that chance, a veering from law, is very real. He assigned probability to an argument's conclusion rather than to a proposition, event, etc., as such. Most of his statistical writings promote the frequency interpretation of probability (objective ratios of cases), and many of his writings express skepticism about (and criticize the use of) probability when such models are not based on objective randomization. Though Peirce was largely a frequentist, his possible world semantics introduced the "propensity" theory of probability. Peirce (sometimes with Jastrow) investigated the probability judgments of experimental subjects, pioneering decision analysis.
Peirce was one of the founders of statistics. He formulated modern statistics in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (1877–1878) and "A Theory of Probable Inference" (1883). With a repeated measures design, he introduced blinded, controlled randomized experiments (before Fisher). He invented an optimal design for experiments on gravity, in which he "corrected the means". He used logistic regression, correlation, and smoothing, and improved the treatment of outliers. He introduced terms "confidence" and "likelihood" (before Neyman and Fisher). (See the historical books of Stephen Stigler.) Many of Peirce's ideas were later popularized and developed by Ronald A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, Frank P. Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, and Karl Popper.

=== Modern perspectives ===
Karl Popper (1902–1994) is generally credited with providing major improvements in the understanding of the scientific method in the mid-to-late 20th century. In 1934 Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which repudiated the by then traditional observationalist-inductivist account of the scientific method. He advocated empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific work from non-science. According to Popper, scientific theory should make predictions (preferably predictions not made by a competing theory) which can be tested and the theory rejected if these predictions are shown not to be correct. Following Peirce and others, he argued that science would best progress using deductive reasoning as its primary emphasis, known as critical rationalism.  His astute formulations of logical procedure helped to rein in the excessive use of inductive speculation upon inductive speculation, and also helped to strengthen the conceptual foundations for today's peer review procedures.
Ludwik Fleck, a Polish epidemiologist who was contemporary with Karl Popper but who influenced Kuhn and others with his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (in German 1935, English 1979). Before Fleck, scientific fact was thought to spring fully formed (in the view of Max Jammer, for example), when a gestation period is now recognized to be essential before acceptance of a phenomenon as fact.
Critics of Popper, chiefly Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, rejected the idea that there exists a single method that applies to all science and could account for its progress. In 1962 Kuhn published the influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which suggested that scientists worked within a series of paradigms, and argued there was little evidence of scientists actually following a falsificationist methodology. Kuhn quoted Max Planck who had said in his autobiography, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
A well quoted source on the subject of the scientific method and statistical models, George E. P. Box (1919–2013) wrote "Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a correct one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist, so over-elaboration and over-parameterization is often the mark of mediocrity" and "Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad."
These debates clearly show that there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes the "scientific method".  There remain, nonetheless, certain core principles that are the foundation of scientific inquiry today.

== Mention of the topic ==
In Quod Nihil Scitur (1581), Francisco Sanches refers to another book title, De modo sciendi (on the method of knowing). This work appeared in Spanish as Método universal de las ciencias.
In 1833 Robert and William Chambers published their 'Chambers's information for the people'. Under the rubric 'Logic' we find a description of investigation that is familiar as scientific method,