'Scientific method' in non-Western societies? (historical question)

You'll find it difficult to understand the history of science if you insist on reading it as the development of a method that fails to account for the plurality we actually see in science, not least if you study the differences in the mechanistic and chemical views from the 1500s onwards.

Indeed, looking for something (the "scientific method") that isn't there is likely to be more problematic than a lack of written records.

"Toby Huff" = "The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West"?

"Sabra" = "Dr. Abdelhamid I. Sabra"? If so, which work of his would you recommend reading first?

My interest in focusing on the scientific method is that it's this aspect of 'science' today which most effectively - today - distinguishes what we call 'science' from mathematics, philosophy, religion, etc.

This is not to say that the scientific method isn't used in other field of endeavour - engineering, medicine, even warfare - simply that (today) the absence of the scientific method in some area of research (e.g. 'creationism', alien abductions, religion) is enough for us to decide that that research isn't 'scientific'.

However, to what extent can we determine that something like observaton and description, hypothesis formation, prediction followed by testing, independent repeatability, etc were recognised as important elements?

IIRC, there are several good books on how these elements were refined and combined to form the scientific method we know and love today; the debts we owe are to people as long ago as the Greek philosophers, various Arab thinkers (also of long ago), a few bright sparks in the Dark Ages (e.g. William of Ockham), as well as many in the Renaissance and since. This is the rise of science 'in the West'.

Suppose there is a unique scientific method; the first thing to ask is "what is it?" Many different answers have been proposed, only a few of which we've seen in this thread. The perhaps more important question, though, is "where is this method to be found?" That is, who uses it? Is it all scientists? Maybe, but if we make the effort to look at science as it's practised, we find that biologists tend to behave rather differently to physicists, or geologists, and so on. Indeed, when we look still closer we find that, say, condensed matter physics has very little in common with particle physics, and likewise for organismic and molecular biology, and so on. When we search for the strands that are the same in each, we still run into trouble; even repeatability of experiments falls by the wayside when we consider one-off results that involve apparatus as large as a town, and some sciences and scientists place a large emphasis on aspects of this supposed method that others barely pay lip service to.

When we study the history of science, moreover, we see just the same diversity of approach - especially in physics, where we find some thinkers refusing to give up experimentally refuted theories but later being proven right to have done so, while others back down too easily and later find their experiments to have been flawed, rather than the theory.

Another tactic we can develop from accounts of the behaviour of scientists is an historical test for proposed methods: we take a famous instance of some theory being adopted that we now consider to have been a good thing, like special relativity, say, along with a candidate for "scientific method" (or any other methodological rule that is said to be what science needs), like rejecting falsified theories, and ask what would have happened to the theory if the rule had been applied or enforced. Since special relativity was refuted by several experiments in the same year it was suggested, we have apparently to lose the rule or special relativity - which would we prefer?

Luckily for us, speaking with the benefit of hindsight, people like Einstein and Planck were convinced that the theory was worth sticking with and it turned out that the falsifying experiments were not so convincing after all, but only years later (by which time, when another experiment seemed to refute the special theory, almost no-one could be found to take it seriously). How can we get around this? We could say that sometimes rules need to be broken to make progress, or that the rules need to be sufficiently flexible, but what does that mean? How flexible? How do we know, before the fact, if we should allow them to be bent or broken? The answer is that we can only determine thisafterwards, but then we have already dispensed with rules in the actual business of science itself.

The moral of the story is that science is too complex to be taken account of by talk of the scientific method. In the past and still today, scientists proceed in many different ways, some methodical and others opportunistic, some following their understanding of what science is supposed to consist of and others not even noticing such ideas. It may be that science is so successful, at least in part, precisely because it is so open.

But what about the ancient Egyptians?

My impression is that the history of the development of what we today call science is fairly well researched, and several good books are available for the general reader.

I'm going to assume you'd appreciate some critique of your ideas, so i hope i don't cause any offence. What you're referring to was called the demarcation problem in the past, but these days it's seen as simplistic (since Laudan described its "demise", really). It's not possible to separate science from these others as you might hope and to see why it's enough to actually look at the business of science across the board. A meaningful demarcation of science fails in large part because each of these are important parts of what we generalise to call science but is in fact a plurality of methodologies that cannot be reduced to that in your link above.

Once again, the situation is rather more complex. Laudan argued at the Arkansas trial - contra Ruse - that appealing to a demarcation on the basis of a few criteria would lead to creation science, and it did. The criteria used are all subject to severe critique and a methodology such as Lakatos' is preferred to the old idea of science and pseudo-science.

These were all known long ago, even if some (like Galen) didn't follow their own advice.

This picture is again far too simplistic and no historian of science of which I'm aware would claim that they suffice. Consider the well-researched and documented influences you omit:
*SNIP

*SNIP
Well, i've already explained that looking for early signs of the "scientific method" is the wrong way to procede: it's anachronistic, at the very least. Historians of science don't treat the rise of science in this way and so looking at the Egyptians probably requires something different, too. What are you hoping to find?

Far from taking 'any offence', I welcome this, and hope that we can have more of it here in PF (BTW, do you know of any other forum where such topics are discussed?)

Laudan?

Let us all have a reference to "a methodology such as Lakatos' " please!

I can see from later in your thread that they might have been 'all known long ago', but how long ago?

and what's the story in societies/civilisations/etc which didn't really contribute (directly) to the development of what we call science?

I meant it as a short-hand; it's developments elsewhere, which didn't subsequently become incorporated into today's 'science', that I'm interested in.

To make something preposterous up, for the sake of illustration, did the Incas develop - and codify - an approach analogous to the "scientific method" webpage I posted earlier (and embellish it with numerous examples, both positive and negative), but the book was burned by the invading Spanish?

The bigger picture that this (hopefully) fits within is the relative effectiveness of the "progress of science" - what elements of science (as we understand it today) can be shown (through the warped lens of history) to be particularly effective (and what are only marginal)?

Although we're still small, we discuss the history and philosophy of science often at my boards and have several experts there (along with me as light relief and for comic effect). You and anyone else would be most welcome.

The philosopher of science Larry Laudan wrote a famous paper on this issue, entitled The Demise of the Demarcation Problem. When i'm posting here, my problem is guessing how much people already know or want to know, especially being new. I don't want to talk down to anyone, but at the same time i don't want to mention references that no-one has heard of.

I meant Imre Lakatos' Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, which you can find in the work of the same name.

We find China well ahead of Europe for a long time, developing astronomical clocks, armillary spheres, records of sunspot activity and observatories that were supported by government. Even geodetic surveys were not beyond the Chinese of the eighth century. Experimenticism was present in Chinese (especially Daoist) alchemy and medicine was well advanced. They were also using magnets to navigate. However, it wasn't until the seventeenth century that they were exposed to Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, along with Euclidean geometry, with the arrival of the Jesuits. There is very little evidence of transmission of ideas from China to Europe and the former never came to the notion of natural law (or similar), in large part due to Daoist philosophical influences as to the unknowability of the Dao.

What do you mean by "effective"? It would probably make more sense if you questioned first the utility of your idea of "scientific method". Is this an appropriate heuristic to use in the history of science? Do we require an essentialist notion of what science is to study its history?

Very interesting; but don't you have be be a christian to really participate?

Is this what one would find if one had the time to read Needham's Science and Civilisation in China?

Basically, output/input; how much incremental 'understanding of the nature and origin of universe (and all it contains)' does one get for each incremental unit of 'effort by scientists etc'?