The Formalization of the Scientific Method
Modern scientific practice developed through many traditions rather than one replacement of authority by experiment.
The scientific method was not formalized in one event during the seventeenth century. Thinkers including Francis Bacon and Galileo contributed to debates about observation and experiment, while institutions such as the Royal Society helped organize communication and scrutiny.
Modern science developed through traditions across cultures and centuries, including mathematics, craft knowledge, instruments, debate, and earlier scholarship. It did not simply replace religion or philosophical authority overnight, and scientific institutions have their own limits and biases.
Without seventeenth-century experimental practices, systematic inquiry might have developed through other institutions or at a different pace. It is not possible to say humanity would have remained permanently in a Dark Age; knowledge traditions were already diverse and changing.
A method is powerful when it makes claims open to testing and correction. Its value lies not in the claim that science is free of assumptions, but in creating practices that expose assumptions to evidence and criticism.
Its value lies not in the claim that science is free of assumptions, but in creating practices that expose assumptions to evidence and criticism.
Which belief do I protect from testing, and what kind of evidence would I accept as a reason to revise it?