Scientific method of inquiry

Rational control of health and environnental risks from technical development requires scientific knowledge which must be acquired through the orderly process of the scientific method of inquiry. Contrary to widely held opinions the latter is no less subjective than other rational human endeavors which require decisions under uncertainty. Indeed, to be applied, the method requires a value system which in ordinary research is supplied by the various scientific disciplines. Because of differences among the disciplinary value systems problems often arise in the interdisciplinary settings of efforts to control risks from technical development. Metrics, the concepts, theory, and practice of measurement is suggested here as a way to deal with such problems. 

Different authors describe the scientific method of inquiry differently depending on what they wish to emphasize The following description serves the purpose of this paper. 

Experiments designed to test specific statistical hypotheses comprise the third step of the scientific method of inquiry. They constitute appeals to experience regarding the validity of a specific scientific conjecture. They provide for the collection of data, i.e., numbers that refer to, characterize, or specify the attributes of a study system of interest. 

Data are the raw product of the scientific method of inquiry. By analysis, refinement and reduction which collectively constitute the fourth step in the sequence, data are converted to information about the nature of study systems. The conversion is accomplished by the Neymann-Pearson process of statistical hypotheses testing(g,). If the collected data are sufficient and pertinent enough to support rejecting or accepting the statistical hypothesis under test, a measurableO. 10) quantity of information about the study system has been extracted. If not, the data cannot be converted to information and therefore cannot contribute to the pool of accepted scientific knowledge. 

It is a commonly held view that the scientific method of inquiry is, or at least ought to be, objective in the sense that it should transcend the personal value system of the researcher. The terms bad science, better science or best science are often used to connote the perceived degree of objectivity of a particular scientific activity

. Further, trans science is a term which was coined to sort and label putative encroachments upon "objective science by issues that can be posed as scientific questions but cannot be answered by the available means of scientific experimentation(15). The term was introduced because it was thought that the division of technologically important issues into scientific and trans-scientific would significantly reduce the problems of converting data into useful iformation. 

As will be shown below, the notion that science is objective is mistaken and the mistake contributes to many of the problems encountered when scientific reseach has immediate economic or political consequences(16-21). It should not be surprising that years after the introduction of the concept of trans-science, we still observe difficulty, conflict and general misunderstanding not of what science can or cannot do, but of what science does do and how. The reason is a general lack of appreciation that the scientific method of inquiry is inherently and specifically subjective and that it requires a value system without which it simply cannot be applied. 

Thus, how to deal effectively and openly with experimental uncertainty remains a problem of modern industrial society if it is admitted that use of the scientific method of inquiry has aspects and consequences which are societally too important to be the exclusive preserve of the scientific disciplines to deal with in terms of unstated assumptions or conventions ... 

The science of the origin of life has to adopt the deterministic, continuity view - otherwise it would not be possible to adopt a scientific method of inquiry,... 

Indeed, this is the foundation of logical positivism, the belief that science and engineering work can be separated from messy social concerns as long as proper scientific and engineering methods of inquiry and design are followed. 

Foucault, like his French predecessor and mentor, Gaston Bachelard, paid particular attention to the primacy in history of discursive breaks and ruptures in knowledge or belief systems.3 In this and in Foucault s emphasis on the relative coercion that disciplines exercised on their practitioners, he made arguments already familiar to Anglo-American scholars acquainted with Kuhn s characterizations of "normal science" and the reasons for a scientific community s coherent outlook. However, unlike Kuhn, Foucault declined to dissect the so-called hard sciences as objects of inquiry, restricting himself to discourses and power relationships in the medical, biological, and social sciences.4 However, Foucault did see the potential in the application of his method for the destruction of the demarcation between scientific and nonscientific spheres of action and belief. 

In proof of the injurious influence of the excise duties on this and other branches of manufacture, it may be stated that the procass for its production has undergone little or no alteration for the lost two or three centuries. Now, however, that the manufacturer is not restricted as to the choice of materials, it remains only for the chemist to supply other and cheaper ones, and to guide the practical man as to the best method of combination and, doubtless, diligent inquiry will reward those who enter upon the subject in a truly scientific spirit. 

Traditional philosophical theories of knowledge, including those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, were about the acquisition of knowledge and, more specifically, about methods for acquiring knowledge. The concern for inquiry and its methods continued in nineteenth-century philosophy of science and even influenced the development of several sciences, but that concern all but vanished in twentieth-century philosophy, where it was replaced by an exclusive focus on the notion of justification of belief. In consequence, except for inadvertence, philosophy has been almost entirely removed from the most striking developments in scientific methods during this century the instrumentation and automation of inquiry. 

---