Science and protocols : the importance of methodology in scientific studies

AUTHOR : Bruno de Wilde, Managing Director Business Development, Normec OWS
The logical square highlighted by Aristotle and developed by modern epistemology, in particular Popper and Kuhn, have made it possible to establish the conditions for rigorous scientific research by identifying the different forms of logical error or faulty reasoning. One of the major challenges of the empirical scientific approach is to prevent the appearance of these logical errors through measurement protocols or thanks to the experimental framework. In Science and Protocols, we wanted to set out the theoretical framework that can shed light on the various issues we have to address when dealing with the issue of agricultural plastics, as well as how to approach these complex problems. Normec OWS explains.
Acquiring knowledge
As a reminder, different forms of knowledge acquisition combine in experimental research:
- Deduction, when one term is contained in another. The risk here is having an equivocal middle term whose definition is not identical between the premise and the minor, for example when the parts do not behave like the whole or change their properties according to their size.
- Induction, when effects are traced back to determine their cause. The major difficulty lies, on the one hand, in determining the effects or properties, which can be very complex and, on the other hand, in their relationship to the cause, because there is always the risk of measuring more than one variable at the same time, with the possibility of mistaking a correlation for a cause.
- Abduction, which is a variant of induction, tries to imagine the possible causes of a phenomenon that will be verified by predictions, the famous ‘models’, the best known of which today is Einstein’s general and special relativity. Its intrinsic limit lies in the incompleteness of the models resulting from the inherent limitations of human intelligence, often aggravated by the confirmation bias that leads humans to prefer results that support their hypotheses while discarding those that go against them, invoking the “exception that proves the rule”
Experimental science is all the more prone to errors of reasoning or logic because it works with material that is, by definition, heterogeneous, which it must classify in order to simplify it in a way that is compatible with our limited intellectual capacities.
Role of protocols
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