LAUSR

There is no formula scientists can follow that will guarantee that their findings are valid and trustworthy. Yet we crave a simple, indubitable grounding for science. Turn on the news and listen to the sneering contempt that pundits and politicians heap on the latest findings on climate change or COVID-19. You may find yourself feeling that very craving. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the myth of a unitary and unassailable ‘scientific method’ has long had a powerful hold on us. Henry Cowles has written a searching, learned, and engrossing exploration of how that myth came to be created. His narrative begins with a period that he christens (borrowing from Charles Sanders Peirce) the Age of Methods. The Age of Methods was born in the great efflorescence of methodological reflection that flowed from the pens of John Herschel, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill, and others in 1830s Britain. Although often at odds, these thinkers shared a common orientation: they attached as much importance to the method by which knowledge of the natural world is attained as to the substance of the knowledge itself. Science, they believed, justifies itself by virtue of its method. Charles Darwin was a student of these great methodologists. And as Cowles shows, Darwin was a great methodologist in his own right. Darwin naturalized science by turning it back on itself—by subjecting scientific methods to scientific investigation. Science, he believed, is not a distinctive mode of inquiry characterized by factual precision and formal rigor, but a natural outgrowth of our evolved sensory