The Scientific Method is a Process for Knowing that is Superior to Empiricism

Since mere observation cannot provide the solution to a problem, no matter how accurately it is conducted the necessary next step is inference the process which leads from the present to the future, from the known to the unknown. Every inference is a sort of adventure. Another difference between the scientific method and ordinary common sense is that the former controls the adventure more carefully, and thus reduces the danger involved. The more rigorous the method the less the danger. Safeguards against danger constitute one of the important problems of the scientific method. There are two ways in which science minimizes danger, each of which we will now discuss briefly.

The first means by which the danger of error is reduced is rigorous reexamination of concepts, or the breaking, we might say, of intellectual habits. In our example the man crossed the street on the basis of his past experience; but if his past experience had been in a village and he has formed habits on that basis he could get into real trouble crossing a busy boulevard in a large city. He needs to break his old habits and approach the problem of getting to the other side of the street on other bases. Old familiar ways of looking at things, fixed intellectual habits, if we want to call them that, restrict the range of possible action when one is confronted with a new situation. The ancients believed that the earth was flat, and static, and that the sun moved around the earth every day. But now we know that the earth is a sphere and that it takes three hundred and sixty-five days for it to move once through its orbit around the sun. The erroneous interpretation of the ancients persisted through the centuries because they were content with the explanation they had and had "got into the habit" of believing that the earth was flat and that the sun moved around it. Thus the most important thing that the scientific method can do to reduce the danger of error is to reexamine concepts, to break old intellectual habits to make comparisons and to arrive at explanations which take account of all the facts ascertained through observation.