ABSTRACT
There has been progress in science. This progress, I have argued, is best understood as an improvement in the verisimilitude of our theories. The explanation of the fact that science has been capturing more truth about the world is that we have evolved evidential or epistemic procedures of some success and that the development of science has by and large been determined by scientists acting on the basis of the outcome of the application of these procedures. Without assuming anything about the character of that procedure, not even that it can be given a verbal formulation, let us refer to it as scientific method, hereafter SM. Method, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a special form of procedure especially in a mental activity’. Is there anything special about SM that distinguishes it from other procedures for finding out about the world, procedures available to pre-scientific man and to the nonscientific man in the street? If so, is there any enlightening general verbal description of SM? These questions will be the focus of the discussion of this chapter. A full discussion of SM would have to cover a multitude of topics, including the design of experiments, the theory of measurement and the role of mathematics in science. My discussion will, for reasons of space, be largely restricted to the question of the possibility of giving an abstract characterization of the factors that ought to guide theory choice.
