George+Week+One

In Dr. Terry Hawles articles, he states his opposition to the Hypothetico-Deductive Method being "the unique and central methodological principle of scientific research" (Hawles, paragraph 12), and to science looking for truth of knowledge. I disagree with both of his claims. The evidence he gave and reasoning he used was flawed and his analogies were presumptuous.

First off, I have two major problems with regards to Dr. Hawles' opinion on the Hypothetico-Deductive Method. The first is that I disagree with the central role he believes it plays in how science is taught. The Scientific Method is not a single methodology for finding information, but instead a much more broad set of guidelines. The Scientific Method is less focused on how you conduct your reasoning and focuses more on backing up claims with evidence. The Hypothetico-Deductive Method is not the central idea in the Scientific Method. My second major quarrel with Dr. Hawles' is his neglect for the validity of the Hypothetico-deductive method. There are certain times when the logic is the only way to describe certain phenomenon. A perfect example of this is the double slit experiment. In order to effectively show how light acts as both a particle and a wave, the hypothetico-deductive method is used to disprove that light is either just a particle or just a wave and reason that it acts as both. In Dr. Halwes seven reasons why Hypothetico-deductive reasoning fails, his third reason states that "... a bad theory, prematurely scraped together in the mistaken belief that a theory is required before scientific work can proceed, can stifle interesting scientific work." (Hawles, point 3 paragraph 3). This cannot be further from the truth. At the worst, a bad hypothesis will be proven wrong down the line and will give researchers more information on what may or may not be true. In the best case scenario's we may learn something from bad hypotheses. This is the case with Stanley Milgram's famous psychology experiment on human obedience. While trying to prove the Shirer thesis, Milgram disproved his own expectations and discovered how far humans are willing to obey authority figures. Contrary to what Hawles thinks, the Hypothetico-deductive method is not the center of the Scientific Method and is not nearly as flawed as he thinks.

The second major issue I have with the articles written by Dr. Hawles is his claim that science should be the search for knowledge and not truth. Knowledge is nothing without truth. Although one may be able to make somewhat accurate predictions without truth, s/he will always be limited in the accuracy for their predictions. Hawles reasoning for searching for knowledge instead of truth has another major flaw. Science builds upon itself and requires certain ideas to be known before others ideas can be made. If the scientific community just tried to find the best way to predict phenomenon instead of looking for the truth, progress would be limited. One major example of this is the Ptolemaic model of the solar system versus the Copernican model. Neither of the models were better at predicting planets, but the scientific community could not come to accept the Copernican model because of the misconceptions that Aristotle had written about motion and because nobody dared challenge his ideas. Astronomical progress was hindered until Galileo straightened out all of the false ideas of Aristotle. Scientific progress becomes limited when people only search for knowledge instead of truth.