re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition avoiding mistakes is certainly highly desirable however it is also widely acknowledged that perfectionism is inimicable to creativity and in ordinary life perfectionism carried beyond a certain point is indicative of a psychological disorder in the extreme case a perfectionist becomes so paralyzed by all the possible mistakes he might make that he is unable to even leave the house in science we want to discover as much truth about the world as possible and we also want to have as much certainty as possible about these discoveries usually there is some trade off between these two desiderata the search for scope and the search for certainty if th century mathematicians had demanded total rigor from newton and leibniz then there would probably be no calculus today because neither of the two could explain calculus in a way that really made sense since they lacked the concept of a limit and in fact because of the lack of a rigorous foundation they made a number of errors in their use of calculus it was only a hundred years later that weistrass was able to give a solid grounding for the ideas of newton and leibniz nonetheless what newton and leibniz did was undoubtedly science and mathematics gained a great deal more from the application of their important ideas than it lost through the mistakes they made in article apr kestrel edu king reasoning com dick king writes somebody writes i doubt if einstein used any formal methodology he also proposed numerous experiments which if performed would distinguish a universe in which special relativity holds from one in which it does not einstein played by the rules which demand that hypotheses only be put out there if there exists a specific experiment that could disprove them these are not the rules according to many who post to sci med and sci psychology according to these posters if it s not supported by carefully designed controlled studies then it s not science taken to the extreme i believe that the attitude that empirical studies are everything and ideas are nothing results in a complete stultification of science for one thing an insistence on an elaborate and expensive methodology results in a sort of scientific trade unionism where those outside the establishment and lacking institutional or corporate support have no chance to obtain a hearing i don t in the least believe that this is the intention of the arbiters of scientific methodology nonetheless it is one of the results and although institutional science has certainly produced many wonderful results i think it is a foolish arrogance for scientists to believe that no one outside the establishment and using less than perfect empirical methodology will ever come with anything worthwhile furthermore the big bucks approach to science promotes what i think is one of the most significant errors in science choosing to investigate questions because they can be readily handled by the currently fashionable methodology or because one can readily get institutional or corporate sponsorship for them instead of directing attention to those questions which seem to have fundamental significance for instance certain questions cannot be easily investigated with statistical methods because the relevant factors are not quantitative one could argue that this is the case for almost all questions in many areas of psychology in my opinion a perusal of many of the papers resulting from the attempt by psychologists to force these questions into a statistical framework gives the lie to russell turpin s assertion that current scientific methods avoid all known errors i think that asking the wrong question is probably the most fundamental error in science ignoring potentially valuable ideas is one of the others and i think that scientific journals are full of all too many studies done with impeccable empirical methods but which are worthless because the wrong question was asked in the first place in the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists psychology seems less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects lady uhunix uhcc hawaii edu lady uhunix bitnet
