Rene Descartes' Impact on the Scientific Method

Rene Descartes' Impact on the Scientific Method

People have always thought about the world around them. Through the centuries they have wondered about what their surroundings were made of. Modern science has proven to be most effective in explaining our environment. What makes modern science superior to the ancient schools of thought is the employment of the scientific method. The man credited to a great extent with the development of the scientific method is René Descartes, a French philosopher who lived from 1596 to 1650. The Cartesian method maintains that in order to arrive at a groundwork for a structure of thought, commonly accepted knowledge must be abandoned, based as it is on the subjective nature of the senses.

Science is a framework for gaining and organizing knowledge. The idea that this framework needs to be based on a solid foundation is an essential part of Descartes' writing. This belief is expressed in Descartes' Meditation I :

It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any frame and permanent structure in the sciences. (Porter 31)

Analogous to Descartes' pursuit of finding a groundwork for his structure of thought, the scientific method calls for rigorous proofs of every part of the scientific framework, especially of its foundation. One result of this pursuit was that of giving calculus a solid structure and basis in the 19th century. Ev...

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...iments to refine or replace the existing theories. This is generally done," he continues, "by using the currently accepted theory to make a prediction and then performing an experiment to see whether the results bear out this prediction" (Zumdahl 5).

Some contemporary philosophers question the Cartesian method, arguing that it disregards things like intuition. However, no other method has been as successful as the Cartesian one. The overwhelming progress of modern science is strong evidence for Descartes' philosophy, a kind of evidence no other school of thought can claim.

Works Cited

Porter, Burton. Philosophy. 3rd ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace college Publishers, 1995.

Zumdahl, Steven. Chemistry. 3rd ed. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993.

Halliday, David, and Krane. Physics. 4th ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992.