Is there a universal set of rules for discovering and testing scientific hypotheses? Since the birth of modern
science, philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers have wrestled with this fundamental question of scientific
practice. Efforts to devise rigorous methods for obtaining scientific knowledge include the twenty-one rules Descartes
proposed in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the four rules of reasoning that begin the third book of
Newton's Principia, and continue today in debates over the very possibility of such rules. Bringing together key
primary sources spanning almost four centuries, Science Rules introduces readers to scientific methods that have
played a prominent role in the history of scientific practice.
Editor Peter Achinstein includes works by scientists and philosophers of science to offer a new perspective on
the nature of scientific reasoning. For each of the methods discussed, he presents the original formulation of
the method; selections written by a proponent of the method together with an application to a particular scientific
example; and a critical analysis of the method that draws on historical and contemporary sources.
The methods included in this volume are Cartesian rationalism with an application to Descartes' laws of motion;
Newton's inductivism and the law of gravity; two versions of hypothetico-deductivism--those of William Whewell
and Karl Popper--and the nineteenth-century wave theory of light; Paul Feyerabend's principle of proliferation
and Thomas Kuhn's views on scientific values, both of which deny that there are universal rules of method, with
an application to Galileo's tower argument. Included also is a famous nineteenth-century debate about scientific
reasoning between the hypothetico-deductivist William Whewell and the inductivist John Stuart Mill; and an account
of the realism-antirealism dispute about unobservables in science, with a consideration of Perrin's argument for
the existence of molecules in the early twentieth century.