The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey

Historian Cowles’s intriguing debut explores changes in the way people have thought about science over time. He opens by opining that the process known as the scientific method is a useful way to carry out research, but it’s a reductive and oversimplified way of describing the “complex and diverse” field that science actually is. Cowles considers Darwin’s development of the theory of natural selection in the early 1840s as a pivotal moment, with the theorist making “both nature and science into systems that evolved through a version of trial and error.” Fueling revolution across many disciplines, Darwin’s approach also influenced social thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Cowles notes. Meanwhile, the developing field of psychology, in the process of transforming from purely “metaphysical” theory into a laboratory science for rigorously studying cognition, provided a model for scientific thought. Cowles gives John Dewey credit for delineating the modern scientific method with his 1910 book How We Think, but suggests its “set of rules for right thinking” in everyday life have been misunderstood as a detailed description of how to conduct science, rather than a mere “outline, to be filled in with details of actual behavior.” Cowles’s probing work delivers fresh insight into a less frequently visited part of intellectual history. (Apr.)