Investigating the Psychological World: Scientific Method in the Behavioral Sciences

1. Method, Methodology, and Realism

1 Method, Methodology, and Realism Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled. —Albert Einstein (1949, 683–684) 1.1 Introduction Modern science is a complex human endeavor comprising many parts. It articulates aims that it seeks to realize; it employs methods to facilitate its investigations; it produces facts and theories in its quest to obtain an understanding of the world; and it is shaped by the institutions within which it is embedded. Although all these dimensions are essential to a full-bodied characterization of science, method is arguably its most important feature. This is because everything we know in science is acquired in good part through the application of its methods, whether it be our knowledge of substantive matters, values, or the methods themselves . Method really matters to science. Although method is vitally important to the conduct of science, discussion of the topic is not particularly fashionable. There are a number of possible reasons for this. One is that some people think there is no such thing as scientific method, or at most that there is very little to scientific method; others think it cannot be given an illuminating characterization ; and still others think it is a complex investigative skill that is tacitly acquired by scientists in the course of learning their craft. Attitudes such as these have some currency because scientists themselves learn very little about scientific methodology in their formal science education. Instead they tend to acquire an operational facility with a small number of “tried and proven” methods that have been judged to 2 Chapter 1 work well in their own specialties. The result is that a number of mistaken ideas about method have gained a foothold in our common thinking about science. A further reason for the devaluing of methodological knowledge is that it is often walled off within specific disciplines and so loses its interdisciplinary integrity. This devaluation seems to be exacerbated by a territoriality, where specialists in particular subjects, principally the philosophy of science and statistics, sometimes proclaim or assume guardianship of scientific method itself. This is not as it should be, because methodology properly understood and practiced is a strongly interdisciplinary undertaking. Important though the insights of philosophers of science and statisticians about scientific method are, to confine one’s appreciation of the topic to what they say about it is to ignore important insights about method offered by other disciplines. Given the complexity of scientific method implied in this chapter’s epigraph, it is appropriate to present some relevant background material to assist us in articulating and understanding some of that complexity. As noted in the preface, I do this by considering a variety of ideas about method, methodology, and realist philosophy of science. An overview of ATOM sets the scene for its extended treatment in the following chapters. 1.2 Criticisms of the Idea of Scientific Method Influenced by the founders of modern scientific method, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, seventeenth-century methodologists understood scientific method as a universally applicable logical procedure that was at once mechanical, rule based, ahistorical, content neutral, and a priori (Nickles, 2009). As such, it was simultaneously thought to be a method of discovery and justification that, upon its correct application, guaranteed the production of knowledge of both the surface features and deep structures of nature. Not surprisingly, this fanciful conception of scientific method has been subjected to strong and prolonged attack by scientists, philosophers of science, and science studies specialists. Modern methodologists have strongly challenged the features of scientific method mentioned by Nickles (2009), and more, leaving us with diminished, and still disputed, conceptions of scientific method. Larry Laudan (1981) tells a suggestive story of how in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, both scientists and methodologists largely gave up on the Method, Methodology, and Realism 3 Baconian conception of inductive method in favor of the method of hypothesis, or the hypothetico-deductive method. Laudan gives two reasons for this general shift: the realizations that a fail-safe method that produced infallible knowledge could not be had, and that inductive method is unable to postulate hidden causes about material things.1 The idea that there is a scientific method characteristic of all scientific inquiry has been attractive to many scientists, and some methodologists still speak in favor of some or other version of the...