Make an observation: Many people do X.
Develop a hypothesis: Doing X is evil and wrong.
Test the hypothesis: Examine the Bible to see what God's Word has to say about practicing X.
Hogswash, this is an argumentum ad absurdum, you've taken a broad guideline and extrapolated it to a ridiculous conclusion. This would fall under pseudoscience, for one thing, there's no explanation as to why doing X is evil and wrong, and for another thing, the review step is missing. It uses a seemingly scientific process to come to a seemingly scientific conclusion that makes untestable predictions or predictions that have been tested and found to be wrong. And what when others review your hypothesis and find it to be wrong?
Not to mention you seem to be assuming that the hypothesis remains static, and that you only need to go through the process once, contrary to what I have
actually said. There's also the point that both here and elsewhere you're ignoring the point that it also neccessarily applies at a collective level as well as an individual one.
My point is that the whole thing is kind of meaningless until we fill it out with more content. It isn't a philosophy of science at all, at best it's just a vague schema around which a plausible philosophy of science might be built. In order to accomplish that we will have to inquire in much greater detail into observation, into hypothesis construction and into the nature of testing.
It's the broadest possible description of the underlying principles. Please try and keep it in that context.
No doubt even Homo erectus practiced trial-and-error. That fits within the schema too. 'Maybe this will work' (hypothesis). 'Try it' (test it). We might choose to call that proto-science or something.
Probably, as I pointed out, even infants conduct scientific investigations, whether they realize it or not. As I have already stated. 'The Scientific Method' is simply the name that we give to the schema within which we apply our curiosity to understand the world aroun
But I don't think that the scientific revolution and the rise of what we think of as modern science was the result of peole suddenly recognizing and enshrining a common-sense schema that everyone had pretty much always been using anyway. The scientific revolution and the success of modern science is more likely to be the result of more subtle advances in things like hypothesis generation and testing, which came about through the marriage of the philosophical and craft traditions in the renaissance period.
I don't recall commenting on the 'scientific revolution'. Only on the scientific method.
People started applying the power of mathematics and logic to problems that had previously only been the interest of dirty-hands trial-and-error craftsmen. We see the new renaissance thinkers being hired by princes to accurately calculate the ballistic flight trajectories of projectiles so as to produce ballistic tables for army gunners. Which led to interest in gravity, accelerations, forces and such things, which in turn created the intellectual environment that produced people like Galileo.
Right. It started with an observation regarding the accuracy of ballistae, trebuchet, and catapults, which led to further observations and the development and testing of that hypothesis through experimentation.
The thing is, that might be all that some scientific work is.
And? Did I or did I not explicitly state that making observations is
PART of the scientific method?
Biologists have surveyed geographical areas of the Amazon basin in order to determine the overall biomass and the biodiversity of species of ants living in that area. I would call that scientific work, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to involve hypothesis testing. There are currently sky surveys underway such as the Sloan survey and the exoplanet surveys. There are automated solar telescopes observing the sun every day, feeding their observations into astrophysical databases. There's all the current work to sequence the genomes of many different species.
All of which will provide
observations which other scientists will be able to use to conduct an
experiment to test a
hypothesis. Get it yet? The fact that individual points of data within the collected data set might never get used is irrelevant. The dataset itself will be used. The SDSS, for example, has already been used to test a number of hypotheses, even though I doubt that there has been a paper that has used every point within the data set.
Sure, much of that data will almost certainly be used in the future to generate hypotheses that might then be tested somehow. The point I'm making is simply that the hypothesis generation and testing hasn't happened yet. Nevertheless, the observations still count as scientific work, even though they don't easily fit into the stereotypical 'scientific method' schema. Even if future hypothesis generation and testing never happen, the current observational work is still scientifically informative and enlightening.
The problem here is your trying to apply my broad over view to literaly and to linearly. None of the 'exceptions' you seem to be coming up with are actually exceptions and fall easily within the broad schema I posted.
In an earlier post I suggested that the H-D model doesn't provide us with a demarcation criterion that enables us to distinguish between what is and isn't science.
The distinguishing between what is and isn't science
is a demarcation. The H-D model, as you call it, forms the basic scaffolding of the scientific method.
We agree on that.
I guess that my point is that if a proposed candidate for "the scientific method" doesn't help us distinguish between practices that are and aren't scientific, then it might not be up to the social and rhetorical tasks that many people seem to want to heap upon it.
But it does, especially once we take peer review into account, which I explicitly acknowledged that I had neglected, because for some reason, I always neglect it.
