So how do scientists gain knowledge, if not by using the scientific method?pic.twitter.com/KaSVdLklhh
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So how do scientists gain knowledge, if not by using the scientific method?pic.twitter.com/KaSVdLklhh
The actual practice of science is quite similar to working in an auto repair shop. On a good day—one when you are doing real work, not writing a grant proposal—it’s mostly dealing with this sort of stuff. [From the Garfinkel et al “Hanging around in labs” paper.]pic.twitter.com/i4sxsGGGqh
Park Doing’s PhD thesis book, on his learning to run the X-ray beam line of a football-field-sized synchrotron:pic.twitter.com/F31m4B3qbS
I seriously considered becoming a molecular biologist, and did all the graduate-level coursework needed for a PhD. It was stuff like this that convinced me not to. [“Hanging around in labs,” p. 11.]pic.twitter.com/EgsNphhoqR
Garfinkel's "Hanging around in labs" paper features a discussion he had with Phil Agre about Phil's and my joint work, and how the contingencies of artificial intelligence research shaped the AI architecture we developed.pic.twitter.com/2NHABbXEzx
I'm genuinely confused by this -- how does it refute "the scientific method"? Yes, most of the time you're trying to fix broken shit, and labs are more like workshops than anybody acknowledges, but don't lab scientists "try changing one thing and see if that fixes it"?
Ah, hmm, may be multiple disjunctures here… The point of the first tweet in the thread is not to *refute* “the scientific method” (it’s “more or less right, as far as it goes”) but to point out that there’s no overall formulation that is both nontrivial and empirically accurate.
So the question is “How actually do scientists gain knowledge, once we admit that there is no concise a priori answer? And how can we find that out?”
One obvious approach is to ask them “how did you determine this specific fact yesterday,” and then they launch into a story about chromatography columns and ethidium bromide or whatever.
Then instead of trying to turn that story into a tidy morality fable about The Scientific Method, you can take it seriously in its own terms. What specifically *is* the logic whereby that experiment shows protein A regulates protein B.
Another thing you can do is to hang out in labs watching scientists do science. Then what you see is “shop work” that is almost perfectly dissimilar to the fables you are taught in HS/undergrad about how science is done.
The actual work is mostly improvisational futzing around with materials and equipment, trying different things out, trying to coax them to produce an answer. And when you do that, you run into the “contingencies” Garfinkel enumerates.
Phil’s insight was that the contingencies are constraints on the form of a cognitive architecture.
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