Is there a scientific method?

So on my first day of class this semester I told my students that there is no such thing as the scientific method.  We talked about the 5-step process they learned in high school (and which, coincidentally, my 9-year old son is learning this year in his 4th grade class), and how science isn't really like that.  I told them they would get to learn about real scientists and how they did what they did, and they would see that science is much too complicated and messy (and exciting!) to be contained within some recipe with a handful of steps.

More recently my son's 4th grade teacher (who is awesome, by the way) asked me to look over her unit review for science, and one of the things on the review was the 5 step scientific method.  My response to her was that while I believe there IS no scientific method, this 5 step process is a good place to start for 4th graders.  And I really think she is right to use it with those kids.  My college students need to learn that reality is more complicated, just as they must do in their history, government, English, etc, courses.

So while I endorse the use of this 5-step so-called "scientific method" in grade school, I think there are a few problems with labeling this process with that title.  First of all, it is really just evidence-based reasoning, a combination of empiricism and deductive logic.  This process is, surely, of great importance in science.  But it is by no means exclusive to the things we think of as science.  Historians use the same methods, and so do police detectives and auto mechanics.  We all use it in our day-to-day lives, like when we are trying to figure out where we left the car keys.  If using this method makes one a scientist then we are all scientists (which is a conclusion I would be happy to embrace).

Second, it is simply a fact that much that is done in professional science (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc) does not follow this method at all.  I've probably never followed it myself, and while I'm no great scientist I have published in respected journals, etc.  Theoretical physics does not lend itself to description by this method, and even experimental physics often violates the norms of this simple process.  Often we already have the data and we just try to come up with some way, ANY way, to make sense of it.

Third, the recipe makes the "formulate a hypothesis" step seem way too easy.  Most of the time it is extremely difficult to formulate a hypothesis to explain some phenomenon without that hypothesis being obviously wrong.  It takes inspiration to come up with good ideas that are even worth pursuing.  And who knows where these ideas come from?  It takes creativity to come up with a good hypothesis.  Trying to encapsulate this in a recipe is like having a recipe for a birthday cake that goes: "Step 1: bake a delicious cake.  Step 2: coat with icing." 

For that matter, even the first step, which is usually stated as "ask a question" or "recognize a problem" or something along those lines, is really hard.  Often it takes creativity and incredible insight just to be able to see that a problem exists, or that there is an interesting question to be asked.  Of course, the 4th graders aren't dealing with questions of this sort and so this method works for them.  But Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al WERE dealing with these tough questions and so my students need to know that the 5-step method won't work for the Copernican Revolution.

Finally, my biggest problem with the 5-step method is that it makes science seem boring.  This isn't a problem for 4th graders.  They LOVE science.  They haven't been conditioned by boring textbooks full of authoritative facts and no discussion of how those facts were found.  But by the time students get to college their love for science has been beaten out of them.  They might be perfectly willing to believe that science can be done by robots mindlessly carrying out the steps of The Method.  They need to see the human side of science, and part of that is finding out that science is not all that methodical.

So, no, I don't believe there is a scientific method.  Scientists solve their problems using the approach coined by Jean-Paul Sartre and advocated by Malcolm X: by any means necessary.  College students need to know this.  It may actually give them a greater appreciation for science and scientists.  But for 4th graders, the good ole' "scientific method" is a great place to start.