Dear Rosan sorry this runs out of hands. Thanks for your response, no big objections :)
Dear Kari
I totally agree
Dear Ken
The concept of pre-science solves some of the issue of one scientific method but not the problem of repeatability as I just argued, and which was one of two criteria in Dons argument of one scientific method.
So excluding the soft sciences helps but where is there precedence for this term pre-science? I briefly looked it up and all I could find is something like this: Knowledge of actions or events before they occur. Could you point to where this term and division comes from? Do the soft sciences agree that they are excluded form science and that they are in some immature stage of science? Does pre-science mean that it eventually develops into real science that means repeatability or, (I repeat and reformulate my question) are there such things that principally are not possible to repeat at least when we set a very strict definition of repeatability, meaning the exact same result. That means some and maybe for design some very central and important issues would escape the demand for repeatability?
I whish some ethnographers or action researchers would respond.
From your answer you also seem to put a great emphasis on argumentation which I think is essential in all sciences.
I agree with everything, the Feyerabend paragraph etc and especially that there is no simple answer. This was my whole point and it still stands to my mind even stronger than before this exchange.
I also agree that we need to look better into hard scientific methods and get better at using them. There are some interesting and creative research designs found in unexpected fields, e.g. in creativity studies.
But I don't think excluding the soft sciences form science just to defend a dated idea of a unified science is valid nor reasonable. To my mind we do have a rich picture of perspectives and methods most might be relevant for design. Even in the hard sciences there are different approaches and visualization and argumentation are central. In some of these cases repeatability is irrelevant while being able to follow the argument and seeing and interpreting the data is central. You could repeat the argument but that does not make sense. The continental drift theory is such an example. Repeatability refers to the scientific lab experiment. The experiment is a very special and limited type of research applicable in many but also a limited amount of cases. Its based on reduction and fractioning. Ecology cannot be put into a lab experiment hence the use of simulations. But repeating a simulation is not a problem, just run it again and get the same results, but this makes no sense.
Dons argument started with stating that repeatability is one of the requirements of a universal scientific method and I disagree.
There a no clean boundaries here but to me there is a gradient from hard to soft.
Best
Birger
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