METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE: DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE FACETS

Two Conceptions of the Methodology of Science

In the course of its long history – most strikingly in recent centuries – scientific inquiry has vastly broadened man's knowledge and deepened his understanding of the world he lives in, and the remarkable successes of predictions and technological applications based on those insights are widely acknowledged as eloquent testimony to the soundness or the “rationality” of scientific methods of research. Yet, there is no unanimity among students of the methodology of science as to whether or to what extent it is possible to formulate clear and precise rules of procedure which are characteristic of scientific research and which make science the exemplar of rationality in the pursuit of reliable knowledge. Nor is there unanimity concerning the grounds on which such rules of scientific inquiry could be established and how, accordingly, their cognitive status is to be understood: Is the methodology of science to be viewed as a descriptive study of actual scientific research or as a quasi-normative discipline aimed at formulating – in an analytic, aprioristic manner – standards of proper or rational scientific inquiry?

These questions have in recent years been the focus of an intense and fruitful debate between two schools of thought, which I will briefly refer to as the analytic-empiricist and the historic-sociological or pragmatist schools. By the former, I mean a body of ideas that, broadly speaking, has grown out of logical empiricism and the work of kindred thinkers.