[MD] Alternatives to the scientific method

[Platt Holden]

Jos:

[Jos}
> Please confront the below process head on:
> 
> Scientists agree on what the scientific method is, I use it exactly as
> intended and propose a hypothesis to explain some observed phenomena. I
> subject the hypothesis to repeated experiment and fail to dis-credit it. I
> accept my hypothesis pragmatically as valid. This is what I have done and
> this is the conclusion I draw. I have arrived at it scientifically, so in
> what way was this not science? 

Seems to me you may have left out an important criteria of the scientific 
method, namely, measurement. From:

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/project_scientific_method.shtml

that  outlines the steps of the scientific method. Among the steps are: 

"Construct a Hypothesis: A hypothesis is an educated guess about how 
things work:
"If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen."
You must state your hypothesis in a way that you can easily MEASURE, and 
of course, your hypothesis should be constructed in a way to help you 
answer your original question.

"Conducting an Experiment: Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion: Once 
your experiment is complete, you collect your MEASUREMENTS and analyze 
them to see if your hypothesis is true or false."  (emphasis added)

I don't remember Pirsig setting out any measurements that were repeatable
much less agreed upon. Sure, you can roughly rate static quality patterns 
on a scale of 1 to 10 or A, B, C etc., but individual assessments would 
vary all over the lot. I give my Buick a quality rating of A, but my next 
door neighbor would give it a C- compared to his Honda. Such would hardly 
qualify as a scientific study.

>From an historical perspective, measurement is also key in the scientific 
method. From Ken Wilber in "Eye to Eye:"

"But there is one other point in regard to Galileo and Kepler, and the 
most important point at that, the very heart of the matter. We saw that 
others before them had carefully used the eye of the flesh; and others 
before them had, in a crude sense, used a type of induction, trying to 
validate their theories in several circumstances. But Galileo and Kepler 
hit upon the real and essential secret of empirical-inductive proof: in a 
scientific experiment, one desires to see if a particular event occurs; if 
it does, something changed. In the physical world, change necessarily 
involves some sort of displacement in space-time; displacement can be 
measured. Conversely, if an event cannot me measured, it cannot be the 
object of an empiric-scientific experiment; and as far as science is 
concerned, it does not exist."

Obviously, Pirsig's Dynamic Quality cannot be measured. Little wonder
science refuses to acknowledge its existence. But, they can't deny Quality 
exists since they consider the scientific method to be very good indeed.

Platt