Inasmuch as philosophical influences, when they have decayed into cultural influences, are transmitted in a confused and garbled manner, it follows that many of those most influenced do not even know the names John Locke or David Hume, are unaware of the unresolved tensions between Lockean empiricism and Cartesian rationalism, and treat the “scientific method” as an undisputed axiom - having never learned that even Isaac Newton, now an icon for the natural sciences, directly contradicted the more common forms the “method” in his famous statement about not making hypotheses. Thus I justify my use of otherwise superfluous quotation marks around the phrase.
Yet it is precisely those icons - which like many icons, are emptied of actual content in the process of being used as an icon - who would most undermine this notion of disciplined a posteriori thought being the paradigm for certain knowledge - again, the irony that Cartesian certainty would be found through Lockean methods! - Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, etc. They were far less certain of themselves and their thoughts than their disciples seem to be.
Or, to bring the matter up to date, as Karl Popper wrote:
All scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and the vast majority of these conjectures ... have turned out to be false. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; ... and our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; ... it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.
The assumption that modern science is a finalized and certain method to gain knowledge is not universally embraced by those very individuals who are allegedly the source of that assumption. The writings of these founders of modern science clearly state their understanding that the conclusions of observational science were not certainties, and that there were other sources of knowledge in addition to such natural sciences.
