I'd put it the other way round. Scientific method, as a human practice, is intrinsically value laden. What you choose to investigate, what you decide to measure, how you measure, what you ignore, how you deal with uncomfortable results, even who you allow to do it, are all soaked in values.
Reposted from
Tom Spoors
Scientific method may be as close to value free as any human activity but scientists have values, foibles and favourites, and are often funded by companies or governments which most certainly are not.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender
influence on my entire life. At 17 it helped me to better understand science, but also the use of metaphors and fictional constructs that it shares with the arts. And what he calls the Habit of Truth that distinguishes it.
It shows how social interactions within the scientific community can help or hinder the process by which new theories and techniques get accepted.
Directly contradicts "But that doesn't mean the method itself is vale laden."
That the (false) sense that the method is value-free helpfully circumscribes reasons for negative results into a narrower domain - and helps to maintain good faith, truth seeking, collaborative, aspects of the method David mentions?
And I think I'm kinda steering at a Schumacher-esk insight about the method being epistemically accumulative, and what maintains that?
Overtly value-laden methods struggle more with accumulation?)
Callon, M. (1980). Struggles and negotiations to define what is problematic and what is not. In K. D. Knorr, R. Krohn, & R. Whitley (Eds.), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation (pp. 197–219). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9109-5_8
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeyearworth.bsky.social/post/3l44ryo2sgz2x
Science construed broadly really *is* the only reliable way of knowing how the world works humans have ever come up with.
That cannot mean it is immune to human problems at any level.
Now there are parts of this practice (for instance, this information will be accepted?) that are relatively 'value-free' (in the sense of: people with different values will accept the outcome). Relatively because all of this it is based on 'truth is relevant'.
I've tried to mould my thinking away from "crap, my predictions were wrong" and towards "There's a reason why we do experiments and not just rely on theory".
Further pondering on my thread in light of it, & reaching synthesis - seems generally aligned with my (+"typical") idea of what "the scientific method" involves, but with a couple of aspects I hadn't thought of 1/
There are countless high profile examples of scientists actually doing exactly what the scientific method says. The time it took from Big Bang theory or relativity to be accepted once the data were there was really not that long.
Cold fusion for example could never be repeated outside of the initial lab conditions, it's been abandoned
Curie's experiments have been verified
The stories told around science make it seem like a series of individual triumphs. That is not true
Sure, some folks abuse scientific method as a fig leaf for their desired outcomes, but that's on them, not science.