Scientific Method in Human Sciences: Bunge and Wallace Models
3.3. Deployment Models of Scientific Method in the Human Sciences: Bunge, Wallace.
As mentioned above, the scientific method developed by Galileo and Bacon has undergone numerous modifications and adaptations for greater efficiency and responsiveness to scientific developments. The literature abounds with methodologies that mostly align with the phases of the method and its required assumptions, often adapted to specific research areas. Among these, we will briefly present Mario Bunge’s model and describe in more detail Walter L. Wallace’s model, both of which hold great prestige within our scientific community.
Mario Bunge’s model can be found in several of his books, mainly in Scientific Research (Barcelona, Ariel 1989, first published in 1969). Bunge argues that the scientific method is characterized by a series of operations leading to knowledge. It starts from an existing body of knowledge and a problem, which can be approached in two ways: a) formulating a hypothesis with testable consequences leading to an estimation of the hypothesis, or b) using a technique that, through contrasting evidence, also leads to the estimation of the hypothesis. The result is the explanation of the problem and thus the availability of a new body of knowledge, and consequently, a new problem worth investigating. According to Bunge, this circularity, to be effective, requires following a series of phases and operations:
- Ask well-formulated and fruitful questions.
- Arbitrate conjectures, founded and contrasted with experience to answer questions.
- Derive logical consequences from the assumptions.
- Design techniques to test the contrasting assumptions.
- Subject these techniques to scrutiny for relevance and reliability.
- Implement and interpret contrasting results.
- Estimate the truth claims of the assumptions and the accuracy of the techniques.
- Determine which domains are worth the assumptions and techniques and develop new problems arising from the investigation.
This concise statement of his methodology should encourage reading his works. If one truly wants to be a researcher, they should put it into practice with all the required detail.
The model of Walter L. Wallace is described in his book The Logic of Science in Sociology (1971), published in Castilian in 1976 by Alianza Editorial.
The model can be visualized with different levels and directions. The bottom half lists various empirical research and statistical analyses. The upper half focuses on generalization, theorizing, and deducing hypotheses. Each column represents a stage of the hypothetical-deductive-experimental method: inductive process (ascending), deductive process (descending), and central deductive-experimental process (ascending). Wallace’s model establishes 5 stages, represented by rectangles, while the operations to move from one stage to another occur within ellipses. These successively interdependent stages are linked by methodological controls, like threads of the method, in which decisions aim for empirical testability.
Stage 1: Individual Observations.
This stage consists of isolated elements that have a record, are stable, repetitive, and can be grouped. Numerically definable elements are not accidental and present statistical relationships. Samples are aspects of reality that provide estimates of parameters leading to empirical generalizations.
This stage emphasizes the crucial role of observation as the origin and source of the scientific method. Science starts with observation, which provides the initial data for experimentation, but it can also provide scientific results without undergoing testing.
This phase has received the most criticism from those who denounce the validity of the scientific method (Feyerabend, Kuhn, Lakatos, and others) because observation, in some way, cannot be neutral and objective; it depends on the theory guiding the direction and determination of the observations. While this may be true, observation ultimately depends on the observer’s fairness and ethics, which should be sufficient to ensure the validity of an investigation. However, economic resources, instrumental means, and opportunity can mediate the scope and depth of observations in a research process.
The treatment of observations through sample selection, measurement, and parameter estimation leads to the next stage.
2nd Stage: Empirical Generalizations.
Isolated empirical generalizations are propositions summarizing observed uniformities of relationships between two or more variables. They are pre-hypotheses, forming the first step towards hypothesis formulation because they lack formalization despite being based on correctly described observations. Integrating observations into a theoretical body of knowledge requires establishing relationships between phenomena and more abstract references.
The operations for the next stage require the development of constructs. Constructs are concepts and propositions that are not directly observable, but are ordered and systematized. They are based on empirical data as a summary of observations and are used to explain reality from a more abstract level. These constructs are what ultimately fill books and libraries. Strength, speed, intelligence, skills, motor skills, and corporations are constructs that serve as abstractions concerning observable facts. They are developed through scientific discourse and support the development of laws that give way to theories. When looking at a medicine ball being thrown, we turn to the construct of strength to justify the launch. When we observe the wisdom of conflict resolution through a mediator’s intervention, we turn to the construct of intelligence as an explanation for successful negotiation.
The operations carried out for the next stage mainly involve the short, rigorous definition of concepts, structuring them into a chain, and systematizing the phenomena, leading to the development of builders.
3rd Stage: THEORIES.
Laws and theories represent the level of generalization to which scientific research aspires.
A law is a confirmed hypothesis that reflects a form of objective function in any domain of physical, social, or human reality, exhibiting systematic regularity.
When constructs are related to observable facts and are widespread, necessary, and apodictically true, the resulting structure is a Theory. Therefore, a theory is a set of propositions relating to certain natural or social phenomena, consisting of symbolic representations of:
a) Relations between observed phenomena.
b) Mechanisms or structures that underlie these relationships.
c) Relationships that are supposed to underlie these mechanisms.
A Theory is a system of laws that explains the significance of events and the relations between them.
In science, theory plays several functions:
a) To guide research by stating the significant facts to be explored.
b) To provide a conceptual framework that allows the symbolic representation of events, triggering a process of scientific research.
c) To allow for the classification of facts, distinguishing and ordering them according to criteria of similarity, relationships, disparity, and so on.
d) To allow for the prediction of phenomena by establishing consistent and widespread patterns beyond particular facts.
e) To indicate or suggest unexplored areas of research.
From this, it follows how important it is to achieve a theory for the development of scientific knowledge, a view not always shared by practitioners who value experience and routine practice over general knowledge.
From this methodological point, the theory should be tested. As proposed by Wallace, this can be done through at least three kinds of comparison/contrast:
a) Through internal comparisons of some parts of the theory with others to test whether the theory is internally consistent and not tautological.
b) By comparing it with other theories in terms of formal object matching, checking if it is informationally superior, has greater conceptual abstraction, is more parsimonious, and offers more flexibility and universality.
c) By contrasting it with empirical facts, comparing its predictions with empirical generalizations or hypotheses appropriate to test the truth of the theory.
Of these three kinds of comparisons, the most viable process is empirically checking the hypothesis.
4th Stage: HYPOTHESIS.
At this point, the theory is built inductively from the collection of observations and measurements, extrapolated through constructs that explain its operation. However, downstream, the application of the theory to observations begins. Once the theory is endorsed, it should serve to explain events and predict real situations. This initiates a process of deduction, a process of demonstration.
This process is characterized by a series of operations grouped under the rubric of logical deduction. It proceeds from theoretical concepts or constructs to concrete, specific, or unique proposals that are more easily verified than the entire theory. This leads to the formulation of hypotheses that can be tested to verify the theory.
Scenarios are carefully formulated propositions, not yet proven and provisional, articulated at the outset of an investigation to be proven by alleged facts. They are the starting point of a demonstration, the nexus between theory and empirical reality, and also between the formalized system and research.
The formulation may have the following expressions
:
– Is there a relationship between this and that? That is a very general formulation and purely exploratory.
– If p then q Formulation and more restrictive.
Its construction reflects a logical formalism, based on two propositions that are necessarily linked.
The formulation of hypotheses claiming compliance with certain requirements:
a) A hypothesis must be well formulated, to be formally correct and meaningful, not semantically empty.
b) It must be based to some extent on prior knowledge and if it is completely new from a certain point of view, must be consistent and reliable body of scientific knowledge in their area, on reliable scientific community.
c) You must be empirically testable, through objective science, that is, by comparison with empirical data in turn controlled by technical and scientific theories.
These requirements make any hypothesis in a scientific hypothesis, logical and objective, but independent of it can be true or false.
At this stage of the model of Wallace, the assumption made, there is a fork. On one side is related to all matters relating to instrumentation, experimental design, interpretation and sampling (lower ellipse graphic) and the other path leads to the statistical hypotheses that starts with the pilot phase. In short, are a series of deductive type operations, unlike those that have been shown in the upward phase of the model, which concluded the elaboration of theoretical constructs, this downturn is seeking facts, hypothetical assumptions on which to verify the theory ..
5th DECISIONS ON ASSUMPTIONS.
Once you have a properly formulated hypotheses, the researcher gives free rein to their imagination to shape the experimental or correlational design to act as a trap that can prove the hypothesis.
The designs, tools, appliances, tests, surveys, modes of observation and experimentation, samples, subjects, objects, etc.. are set in data, observational or experimental, full of information that allow testing hypotheses, which is not simply the adjustment of the hypothesis with the facts, with the situation, with the discovery of reality.
The first task is to test the hypothesis with reality, with facts or observations, and checked if there is an adjustment of the hypothesis with reality, and acting accordingly, you get a confirmation or refutation of the theory that hypothesis was derived. In this regard Popper argued that the test of a theory depends upon basic statements whose acceptance or rejection depends on certain decisions, and thus are decisions that ensure the fate of theories.
Statistical hypotheses are opposed to a percentage level of significance, experimental hypotheses are always a causal contrast and decisions to accept or reject this hypothesis either true or false, always involve committing a Type I error, if being real is rejected as false, or a Type II error, false if it is being accepted as true. The error is implicit in all contrasting, but you can control the margin of error that is willing to admit, so the statistical tests provide more objective rules, more stringent and more sensitive, measuring the fit between hypothesis and discovery, provided that the contrast so the hypothesis and the findings are expressed cuantitativa.En Human Sciences, probabilistic decisions are almost always with a certain confidence level or margin of error control. If not, as Wallace notes, be returned to the authoritarian knowledge, mystical-rational or logical.
A decision on the assumption leads to the logical inference, which is a trial on the theory that the hypothesis was derived. This trial decision making is performed to confirm the theory, to modify the theory or to reject it. And this time have regard to the evidence accepted by the scientific community and the uniqueness or consistency of the tests of the assumptions made to date, ie the accumulation of research. This inference can be equally successful, because with the acceptance or rejection loop starts a new research.
The theory is the ultimate goal of an investigation. Spending money and resources on the mere hypotheses and sometimes not even that, to test or fill out a lot of pages, without having to support a theory behind the research tasks, to the obedience of continuous related to falsification of confirm or reject, is simply a blunder or a riot, and unfortunately many are so Doctoral Thesis.
Wallace reminds us, the theories have two features in the scientific process: explain empirical generalizations are already known (ie, sum up the past of a science) and predict empirical generalizations that are still unknown (that is, guide the future of a science). We want to know not just as things have worked in the past, not only how to work in the future, but both say the reason is necessary and true, read apodictic, how should human beings in nature.
Finally, a scientific theory is reached on the model of Wallace’s hypothetical deductive experimental method is a deductive system consisting of a series of propositions which we will call initial proposals which are other propositions, which we will call propositions deduced according to logical principles.
Unlike philosophy, whose history is a collection of philosophical systems as to how to accumulate wealth, science, not summative, is a substitute, a substitute for other achievements findings and drive new situations, thanks to the circularity of proposed hypotheses are tested to accept or reject theories that are kept in a fruitful balance, supported by the plausibility of the facts and ethics and honesty of scientists’ behavior, which at this time, 2009, appears to be compromised.