The scientific method is wonderfully simple, intuitive, and above all effective. Based on the available evidence, you formulate several hypotheses and assign prior probabilities to each one. Then, you devise an experiment which will produce new evidence to distinguish between the hypotheses. Finally, you perform the experiment, and adjust your probabilities accordingly.
Either there is more than one “scientific method”, it isn’t really a method, or science doesn’t actually follow the scientific method (and therefore, cannot be justified by that method).
Science approximates that method. Most scientists don’t explicitly assign their hypotheses prior probabilities and then use Bayesian updating on the results of their experiments, but their brains have to assign different levels of credence to different hypotheses (to determine which ones get the attention) and adjust those credence levels as new data comes in, and the larger scientific community performs a similar process to determine consensus; Bayes-structure is implicit in there even if you’re not actually using probability math.
I think your third idea is right: science cannot be used to justify its own fundamental principles. For one thing, that argument would be very circular.
Either there is more than one “scientific method”, it isn’t really a method, or science doesn’t actually follow the scientific method (and therefore, cannot be justified by that method).
Science approximates that method. Most scientists don’t explicitly assign their hypotheses prior probabilities and then use Bayesian updating on the results of their experiments, but their brains have to assign different levels of credence to different hypotheses (to determine which ones get the attention) and adjust those credence levels as new data comes in, and the larger scientific community performs a similar process to determine consensus; Bayes-structure is implicit in there even if you’re not actually using probability math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
I think your third idea is right: science cannot be used to justify its own fundamental principles. For one thing, that argument would be very circular.