Frequently the scientific method is employed not only by a single person, but also by several people cooperating directly or indirectly. Such cooperation can be regarded as an important element of a scientific community. Various standards of scientific methodology are used with- in such an environment.

Scientific journals use a process of peer review, in which scientists' manuscripts are submitted by editors of scientific journals to fellow sci- entists familiar with the field for evaluation. In certain journals, the journal itself selects the referees; while in others, the manuscript author might recommend referees. The referees may or may not recommend publication, or they might recommend publication with suggested modi- fications, or sometimes, publication in another journal. This standard is practiced to various degrees by different journals, and can have the ef- fect of keeping the literature free of obvious errors and to generally im- prove the quality of the material, especially in the journals who use the standard most rigorously. The peer review process can have limitations when considering research outside the conventional scientific paradigm: problems of "groupthink" can interfere with open and fair deliberation of some new research.

Sometimes experimenters may make systematic errors during their experiments, veer from standard methods and practices for various rea- sons, or, in rare cases, deliberately report false results. Occasionally be- cause of this then, other scientists might attempt to repeat the experi- ments in order to duplicate the results.

Researchers sometimes practice scientific data archiving, such as in compliance with the policies of government funding agencies and scien- tific journals. In these cases, detailed records of their experimental pro- cedures, raw data, statistical analyses and source code can be preserved in order to provide evidence of the methodology and practice of the pro- cedure and assist in any potential future attempts to reproduce the result. These procedural records may also assist in the conception of new ex-

periments to test the hypothesis, and may prove useful to engineers who might examine the potential practical applications of a discovery.

When additional information is needed before a study can be repro- duced, the author of the study might be asked to provide it. They might provide it, or if the author refuses to share data, appeals can be made to the journal editors who published the study or to the institution which funded the research.

Since it is impossible for a scientist to record everything that took place in an experiment, facts selected for their apparent relevance are reported. This may lead, unavoidably, to problems later if some suppos- edly irrelevant feature is questioned. For example, Heinrich Hertz did not report the size of the room used to test Maxwell's equations, which later turned out to account for a small deviation in the results. The prob- lem is that parts of the theory itself need to be assumed in order to select and report the experimental conditions. The observations are hence sometimes described as being 'theory-laden'. The primary constraints on contemporary science are:

· Publication, i.e. Peer review

· Resources (mostly funding)

It has not always been like this: in the old days of the gentleman sci- entist funding were far weaker constraints. Both of these constraints in- directly require scientific method – work that violates the constraints will be difficult to publish and difficult to get funded. Journals require submitted papers to conform to "good scientific practice" and to a de- gree this can be enforced by peer review. Originality, importance and interest are more important – see for example the author guidelines for Nature.

Smaldino and McElreath 2016 have noted that our need to reward scientific understanding is being nullified by poor research design and poor data analysis, which is leading to false-positive findings.

Evolution of science

Philosophy of science looks at the underpinning logic of the scien- tific method, at what separates science from non-science, and the ethic that is implicit in science. There are basic assumptions, derived from philosophy by at least one prominent scientist, that form the base of the scientific method – namely, that reality is objective and consistent, that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that ration- al explanations exist for elements of the real world. These assumptions

from methodological naturalism form a basis on which science may be grounded. Logical Positivist, empiricist, falsificationist, and other theo- ries have criticized these assumptions and given alternative accounts of the logic of science, but each has also itself been criticized. More gener- ally, the scientific method can be recognized as an idealization.

Thomas Kuhn examined the history of science in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and found that the actual method used by sci- entists differed dramatically from the then-espoused method. His obser- vations of science practice are essentially sociological and do not speak to how science is or can be practiced in other times and other cultures.

Norwood Russell Hanson, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn have done extensive work on the "theory laden" character of observation. Hanson first coined the term for the idea that all observation is depend- ent on the conceptual framework of the observer, using the concept of gestalt to show how preconceptions can affect both observation and de- scription. He opens Chapter 1 with a discussion of the Golgi bodies and their initial rejection as an artefact of staining technique, and a discus- sion of Brahe and Kepler observing the dawn and seeing a "different" sun rise despite the same physiological phenomenon. Kuhn and Feyera- bend acknowledge the pioneering significance of his work.

Kuhn said the scientist generally has a theory in mind before design- ing and undertaking experiments so as to make empirical observations, and that the "route from theory to measurement can almost never be traveled backward". This implies that the way in which theory is tested is dictated by the nature of the theory itself, which led Kuhn to argue that once it has been adopted by a profession no theory is recognized to be testable by any quantitative tests that it has not already passed.

Paul Feyerabend similarly examined the history of science, and was led to deny that science is genuinely a methodological process. In his book Against Method he argues that scientific progress is not the result of applying any particular method. In essence, he says that for any spe- cific method or norm of science, one can find a historic episode where violating it has contributed to the progress of science. Thus, if believers in scientific method wish to express a single universally valid rule, Feyerabend jokingly suggests, it should be 'anything goes'. Criticisms such as his led to the strong programme, a radical approach to the soci- ology of science.

The postmodernist critiques of science have themselves been the subject of intense controversy. This ongoing debate, known as the sci-

ence wars, is the result of conflicting values and assumptions between the postmodernist and realist camps. Whereas postmodernists assert that scientific knowledge is simply another discourse and not representative of any form of fundamental truth, realists in the scientific community maintain that scientific knowledge does reveal real and fundamental truths about reality. Many books have been written by scientists, which take on this problem and challenge the assertions of the postmodernists while defending science as a legitimate method of deriving truth.

Role of chance in discovery

Somewhere between 33% and 50% of all scientific discoveries are estimated to have been stumbled upon, rather than sought out. This may explain why scientists so often express that they were lucky. Louis Pas- teur is credited with the famous saying that "Luck favours the prepared mind", but some psychologists have begun to study what it means to be 'prepared for luck' in the scientific context. Research is showing that scientists are taught various heuristics that tend to harness chance and the unexpected. This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "Anti- fragility"; while some systems of investigation are fragile in the face of human error, human bias, and randomness, the scientific method is more than resistant or tough – it actually benefits from such randomness in many ways. Taleb believes that the more anti-fragile the system, the more it will flourish in the real world.

Psychologist Kevin Dunbar says the process of discovery often starts with researchers finding bugs in their experiments. These unexpected results lead researchers to try to fix what they think is an error in their method. Eventually, the researcher decides the error is too persistent and systematic to be a coincidence. The highly controlled, cautious and cu- rious aspects of the scientific method are thus what make it well suited for identifying such persistent systematic errors. At this point, the re- searcher will begin to think of theoretical explanations for the error, of- ten seeking the help of colleagues across different domains of expertise.

The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodol- ogy of scientific inquiry, as distinct from the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straight- forward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philoso- phers and scientists have argued for the primacy of one or another ap- proach to establishing scientific knowledge. Despite the disagreements

about approaches, scientific method has advanced in definite steps. Ra- tionalist explanations of nature, including atomism, appeared both in ancient Greece in the thought of Leucippus and Democritus, and in an- cient India, in the Nyaya, Vaisesika and Buddhist schools, while Char- vaka materialism rejected inference as a source of knowledge in favour of an empiricism that was always subject to doubt.

Aristotle pioneered scientific method in ancient Greece alongside his empirical biology and his work on logic, rejecting a purely deductive framework in favour of generalisations made from observations of na- ture. Important debates in the history of scientific method center on ra- tionalism, especially as advocated by René Descartes, inductivism, which rose to particular prominence with Isaac Newton and his follow- ers, and hypothetico-deductivism, which came to the fore in the early 19th century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a debate over re- alism vs. antirealism was conducted as powerful scientific theories ex- tended beyond the realm of the observable, while in the mid-20th centu- ry, prominent philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend argued against any universal rules of science at all.

Science is the process of gathering, comparing, and evaluating pro- posed models against observables. A model can be a simulation, math- ematical or chemical formula, or set of proposed steps. Science is like mathematics in that researchers in both disciplines can clearly distin- guish what is known from what is unknown at each stage of discovery. Models, in both science and mathematics, need to be internally con- sistent and also ought to be falsifiable. In mathematics, a statement need not yet be proven; at such a stage, that statement would be called a conjecture. But when a statement has attained mathematical proof, that statement gains a kind of immortality which is highly prized by mathe- maticians, and for which some mathematicians devote their lives.

Mathematical work and scientific work can inspire each other. For example, the technical concept of time arose in science, and timeless- ness was a hallmark of a mathematical topic. But today, the Poincaré conjecture has been proven using time as a mathematical concept in which objects can flow.

Nevertheless, the connection between mathematics and reality re- mains obscure. Eugene Wigner's paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, is a very well known account of the issue from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. In fact, some observers

have suggested that mathematics is the result of practitioner bias and human limitation, somewhat like the post-modernist view of science.

The mathematical method and the scientific method differ in detai. In Pólya's view, understanding involves restating unfamiliar definitions in your own words, resorting to geometrical figures, and questioning what we know and do not know already; analysis, which Pólya takes from Pappus, involves free and heuristic construction of plausible arguments, working backward from the goal, and devising a plan for constructing the proof; synthesisis the strict Euclidean exposition of step-by-step de- tails of the proof; review involves reconsidering and re-examining the result and the path taken to it. Gauss, when asked how he came about his theorems, once replied "durch planmässiges Tattonieren".

Imre Lakatos argued that mathematicians actually use contradiction, criticism and revision as principles for improving their work. In like manner to science, where truth is sought, but certainty is not found, in Proofs and refutations, what Lakatos tried to establish was that no theo- rem of informal mathematics is final or perfect. This means that we should not think that a theorem is ultimately true, only that no counter- example has yet been found. Once a counterexample, i.e. an entity con- tradicting/not explained by the theorem is found, we adjust the theorem, possibly extending the domain of its validity.

This is a continuous way our knowledge accumulates, through the logic and process of proofs and refutations. If axioms are given for a branch of mathematics, however, Lakatos claimed that proofs from those axioms were tautological, i.e. logically true, by rewriting them, as did Poincaré Lakatos proposed an account of mathematical knowledge based on Polya's idea of heuristics. In Proofs and Refutations, Lakatos gave several basic rules for finding proofs and counterexamples to con- jectures. He thought that mathematical 'thought experiments' are a valid way to discover mathematical conjectures and proofs.

The scientific method has been extremely successful in bringing the world out of medieval thinking, especially once it was combined with industrial processes. However, when the scientific method employs sta- tistics as part of its arsenal, there are mathematical and practical issues that can have a deleterious effect on the reliability of the output of scien- tific methods. This is described in a popular 2005 scientific paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by John Ioannidis.

The particular points raised are statistical and economical Hence: "Most research findings are false for most research designs and for most

fields" and "As shown, the majority of modern biomedical research is operating in areas with very low pre- and poststudy probability for true findings." However: "Nevertheless, most new discoveries will continue to stem from hypothesis-generating research with low or very low pre- study odds," which means that *new* discoveries will come from re- search that, when that research started, had low or very low odds of succeeding. Hence, if the scientific method is used to expand the fron- tiers of knowledge, research into areas that are outside the mainstream will yield most new discoveries.

Philosophy of Technology

If philosophy is the attempt ―to understand how things in the broad- est possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term‖, as Sellars put it, philosophy should not ignore tech- nology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs to- gether. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. Indeed during the last two centuries, when it gradually emerged as a discipline, philosophy of technology has mostly been con- cerned with the impact of technology on society and culture, rather than with technology itself. Mitcham calls this type of philosophy of tech- nology ‗humanities philosophy of technology‘ because it is continuous with social science and the humanities.

Only recently a branch of the philosophy of technology has devel- oped that is concerned with technology itself and that aims to under- stand both the practice of designing and creating artifacts and the nature of the things so created. This latter branch of the philosophy of technol- ogy seeks continuity with the philosophy of science and with several other fields in the analytic tradition in modern philosophy, such as the philosophy of action and decision-making, rather than with social sci- ence and the humanities.

The entry starts with a brief historical overview, then continues with a presentation of the themes that modern analytic philosophy of tech- nology focuses on. This is followed by a discussion of the societal and ethical aspects of technology, in which some of the concerns of humani- ties philosophy of technology are addressed. This twofold presentation takes into consideration the development of technology as the outcome of a process originating within and guided by the practice of engineer- ing, by standards on which only limited societal control is exercised, as well as the consequences for society of the implementation of the tech-

nology so created, which result from processes upon which only limited control can be exercised.

Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy itself. Our oldest testimony is from ancient Greece. There are four prominent themes. One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature According to Democritus, for example, house- building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spi- ders building their nests and nets, respectively. Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus‘ examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: ―generally art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature‖.

A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle, Physics II.1, the former have their principles of generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and forms in the human soul. Natural products move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves by in- ner final causes; they are driven by purposes of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and in- tervention, they vanish after some time by losing their artificial forms and decomposing into materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to earth or changes back into its botanical nature by put- ting forth a shoot. The thesis that there is a fundamental difference be- tween man-made products and natural substances has had a long-lasting influence. In the Middle Ages, Avicenna criticized alchemy on the ground that it can never produce ‗genuine‘ substances. Even today, some still maintain that there is a difference between, for example, natu- ral and synthetic vitamin C.

Aristotle‘s doctrine of the four causes – material, formal, efficient and final – can be regarded as a third early contribution to the philoso- phy of technology. Aristotle explained this doctrine by referring to tech- nical artifacts such as houses and statues. These causes are still very much present in modern discussions related to the metaphysics of arti- facts. Discussions of the notion of function , for example, focus on its inherent teleological or ‗final‘ character and the difficulties this presents to its use in biology. And the notorious case of the ship of Theseus – see this encyclopedia‘s entries on material constitution, identity over time, relative identity and sortals – was introduced in modern philosophy by

Hobbes as showing a conflict between unity of matter and unity of form as principles of individuation. This conflict is seen by many as charac- teristic of artefacts. David Wiggins takes it even to be the defining char- acteristic of artifacts.

A fourth point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his Timaeus, Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His ac- count of the details of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry, weaving, ceramics, metallurgy, and agricultural technology. Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite their negative apprecia- tion of the life led by artisans, who they considered too much occupied by the concerns of their profession and the need to earn a living to quali- fy as free individuals, both Plato and Aristotle found technological im- agery indispensable for expressing their belief in the rational design of the universe.