Scientific Reasoning

Scientific reasoning, like science itself, is a constantly changing and inherently fascinating system of interrelated concepts, practices, and theoretical approaches to conducting science. This entry discusses the philosophical and empirical approaches used to understand the scientific process and how those approaches have coevolved with it. Early research on scientific thinking offered conclusions that were potentially universal for all sciences about the formation of hypotheses, optimizing scientific research, and the implications of these conclusions for science education. Modern research on scientific thinking has become much more specific to individual scientific disciplines (such as molecular biology), and it studies the way science is conducted in the real world by observing scientists as they work or by analyzing their diaries and research notes. The new field of educational neuroscience has outlined the brain structures involved in such reasoning as well. This entry also explains the importance of viewing science in its appropriate historical context and examines how modern scientific thinking has been influenced by the vast capabilities of robotics and computers.

Just 20 years ago the field was dominated by a small set of questions regarding the best ways to conduct science, the relationship between hypotheses and experiments, what scientific reasoning strategies should be taught, and whether there could be a unified science of science. Much cognitive and philosophical work focused on when and whether scientists should attempt to confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses. Many researchers followed the view of Karl Popper that scientists should attempt to disconfirm their hypotheses. However, more fine-grained research demonstrated that many scientists seek to confirm their hypotheses early on in a research project and seek disconfirmation at later stages of research. Researchers also focused on whether science is primarily inductive (inferring general rules from a finite number of observations), deductive (generating specific conclusions from known, general rules), or abductive (inferring a cause that would best explain a given effect) and found that these different forms of reasoning are all used in science, rather than science being one form of reasoning exclusively.