Understanding Key Scientific and Philosophical Methods

Hypothetical-Deductive Method

The complete method of natural science is divided into three levels:

• Protocol Statements: These express world phenomena that can be established empirically.
• Laws: These are universal statements that express the behavior or relationship of certain phenomena in a regular and unvarying manner.
• Theories: These are universal statements that can be drawn from all the laws of a particular science.

One or more explanatory hypotheses are developed based on observed facts or detected problems.

Key Processes:

• Verification: A hypothesis is considered true when the observed facts agree with the facts deduced from the hypothesis.
• Falsification: A hypothesis is refuted or "false" when the facts in the world do not agree with the facts deduced from the hypothesis.

Rational-Empirical Method

With this method, we have two primary sources of knowledge: the senses and understanding. Through them, we access two levels of reality: the sensible and the intelligible.

• The Sensible Level: This first level of reality is constituted by the data provided to us by the senses. According to these sensory inputs, reality appears multiple and constantly changing.
• The Intelligible Level: This second level describes how things truly are and what constitutes their essence. In other words, understanding captures something permanent, something that does not change and acts as a support for all the changes observed in a single thing.

This method is often called empirico-rational because it begins with the physical experience of movement and culminates in the working of the mind.

Hermeneutical Method

The word hermeneutics means "to interpret" and "to understand." It is the art of interpreting and understanding the meaning of texts, primarily religious and legal, but also literary, scientific, and philosophical. This art extends beyond texts and is universal in its application.

Social sciences, which are concerned with human actions, cannot simply try to explain their causes, as one might explain a natural phenomenon. Instead, they must strive to understand and interpret the meaning of those actions.

Hermeneutics, therefore, primarily proposes two things:

1. To show that methods concerned with explaining chance events are insufficient to understand history, because meaning is not merely explained but unfolds through experience.
2. To attempt to answer the question: "How is understanding possible?"

The answer to this question can be directed in two ways:

• Non-Normative Hermeneutics: This approach believes that philosophy must conform to discovering the elements that enable understanding, recognizing that each understanding is different and there is no single way to progress or achieve better understanding.
• Normative Hermeneutics: This approach seeks to discover, among the elements that make understanding possible, criteria from which to criticize "false understandings," believing that it is possible to make progress in understanding.