How the actual “scientific method” has nothing to do with science at all
As many stand-up comedians will joyfully point out, there are many common expressions whose meaning has drifted so far from its original context as to now be thoroughly unrecognizable. Perhaps the most iconic example comes from that famous scene in Seinfeld when a bemused Jerry is smoothly informed by the lady at the rental car agency that the type of car he reserved is not available.
“I don’t understand”, he declares, “I made a reservation. Do you have my reservation?”
“Yes we do, but unfortunately we ran out of cars.”
“But the reservation keeps the car here. That’s why you have reservations.”
“I know why we have reservations,” snaps back the touchy clerk.
“I don’t think you do,” Jerry informs her. “You see, you know how to take the reservation, but you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation – the holding.”
But while the “unheld reservation” might top the list of flagrantly nonsensical notions that we’ve all personally experienced, there are dozens of other, much less widely appreciated, ones out there. In particular, for some mysterious reason there seems to be a particular preponderance of laughably inappropriate terms firmly embedded within the world of critical inquiry and scholarship.
From “evidence-based research” (is there such a thing as “non-evidence based research”?) to “postmodernism” (what comes after that?) to “interdisciplinarity” (who set the ‘disciplinary boundaries’ to begin with?), many of the standard descriptions of academic culture routinely thrown around these days range from the unhelpfully incoherent to the perniciously subjective (such as the stridently tendentious “woke”).
To me, at least, the most exasperatingly inappropriate expression of all is, “the scientific method”.
We’re all told what this is in primary school: the rigorously objective process of hypothesis creation and empirical testing that firmly distinguishes science from other emotional, subjective and more “intuitive” human pursuits, such as art or music.
It is a very familiar story. And it is almost completely wrong.
In the first place, much of what happens on the cutting edge of science is not only highly emotional, subjective and intuitive (as you would expect from an activity practiced by humans), it is rarely as formally “hypothesis-driven” as most naively suppose, particularly in areas where experimental confirmation or “falsification”—itself a much more subtle and nuanced concept than almost everyone appreciates—can be highly problematic, such as particle physics or cosmology or evolutionary biology.
But while it’s certainly the case that the vast majority of practicing scientists don’t spend their days ritualistically invoking the “scientific method” in the way that we all unthinkingly assume, it’s equally true—and perhaps even less widely appreciated—that virtually all the greatest scholars in so-called non-scientific domains have established their reputations by consistently invoking the highest levels of “scientific rigor”.
The real “scientific method”, in other words—the steadfast determination to build a case by deliberately seeking out the most potentially revealing evidence while maintaining a vigorous skepticism of all past assumptions, very much including one’s own—is no more uniquely appropriate to physics or chemistry than it is to political philosophy or art history.
It’s not about “science” at all, in fact. It’s simply the way to genuinely deepen our understanding, to learn what’s truly going on in whatever domain we happen to be interested in.
Which brings me to John Shearman, the great Raphael scholar who died in 2003. I first “encountered” Shearman when researching my recent film on Raphael (Raphael: A Portrait); and it didn’t take long to recognize that every sentence he wrote (and he wrote many), was the product of a staggering amount of critical reading and deeply measured reflection. If John Shearman said something, it could be right or wrong like anyone else (more likely right, as it happens), but it certainly wouldn’t be nonsense.
Now, that might not sound so revolutionary. After all, most of us don’t expect art historians to generally go around spouting nonsense. But it turns out, unsurprisingly perhaps, that art historians are on the whole no better or worse than the rest of us, which means that if you look closely enough, you will soon discover that there is a significant share of nonsense that’s being spouted on a regular basis.
Intriguingly enough, not so much when it comes to Raphael, where the modern canonical accounts by the likes of Nicholas Penny, Paul Joannides, Caroline Elam and—most of all—Shearman himself are all so obviously studied, knowledgeable and generally mutually reinforcing.
But when it comes to Botticelli (the subject of my current documentary project), it’s a different story entirely, with the intrepid visitor being suddenly confronted with an array of hostile tribal camps vigorously promoting their causes while disdainfully glowering at each other across their interpretive barricades.
It’s hard to know for certain why there’s such a marked difference between the two subdisciplines. History, surely, has a lot to do with it. Our current understanding of Raphael reflects the steadied accumulation of more than 500 years of continuous scholarship, while Botticelli was largely ignored for the better part of three and a half centuries before being fervently resurrected by the pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin, a combination which was virtually guaranteed to send it down the most passionately flighty path imaginable.
And then there’s the fact that there’s much less in the way of bonafide documentary sources for Botticelli compared to Raphael, an absence that, in turn, led to the widest possible development of speculative theories to explain Botticelli’s often highly enigmatic masterpieces (see also Renaissance Tales).
But there’s something else going on, I suspect: a question of attitude. It’s hard not to conclude that one of the reasons to explain the sociological gulf I’ve discovered between Raphael studies and Botticelli studies has a lot to do with the personalities of those who are doing the studying. In particular, I’m convinced that our collective knowledge of Botticelli would be significantly advanced if there were more John Shearmans around to rigorously investigate his case in his characteristically “scientific” way.
In other words, it might well turn out that our major scholarly frustration—the lack of appropriate historical sources—is more a consequence of the present sociology than its cause. Clearly, there are far fewer trustworthy Botticelli-related historical documents around than we’d like, but you’re not likely to stumble upon them (or appreciate their significance) if the main thing you’re focused on is hunting for evidence to support your own particular narrow interpretive theory.
As it happens, despite the frustrating lack of bonafide historical documentation, there have been occasional leaps forward in our understanding, with the most significant case in modern times coming 50 years ago through the discovery of detailed inventories in a Florentine archive that showed that both Primavera and The Birth of Venus weren’t originally hanging at the Medici Villa at Castello as had been long thought, but in a city townhouse—a seemingly benign fact that turns out to reveal a great deal about why both paintings had been painted to begin with (or at least why they were not).
More precisely, as the author of that groundbreaking 1975 article forthrightly states at the outset, our suddenly-increased knowledge about two of Botticelli’s most famous paintings wasn’t so much the result of a “discovery”, per se, but simply flowed from a determination to rigorously examine existing evidence with fresh eyes:
“The inventory-materials to be published here are not wholly unknown. They are taken from one of the richest and most frequently consulted fondi of the Archivio di Stato in Florence, Mediceo avanti il Principato, and it would be absurd to regard as a ‘discovery’ any document listed, like these, in a printed catalogue. Furthermore some brief extracts from two of them have been published. But if they remain disregarded by scholars who write seriously on Botticelli, Signorelli and Michelangelo we may fairly say that they deserve to be better known…”
As you’ve likely guessed by now, the writer of those words, one of the clearest encapsulations imaginable of the genuine “scientific method”, was none other than John Shearman himself. We need more like him to make progress. In anything.
Howard Burton, September 16, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and the creator of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
