The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. The purpose now is precise guidance of thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high school lab notebooks but the purpose here is no longer just busy work.
The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments, (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it’s a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up.
Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method.įor this you keep a lab notebook. There’s no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic’s techniques, but you know in the end you’re going to get it. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer-slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible.
The correct program for this interweaving is formalized as scientific method.Īctually I’ve never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. For example, if, from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively by electricity from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.ĭeductive inferences do the reverse. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Induction, Deduction and the Scientific Method