Scientifi c Methods 311Japanese kagaku. Differences and similarities can ultimately tell us much
about alternative visions of science, nature, and their role in culture.
We therefore should not take seriously the claim offered by a lengthy
Wikipedia entry on the scientifi c method that its development “is insepa-
rable from the history of science itself.”^9 Or rather, we should take it more
seriously than the author perhaps intended. That is, talk about “scientifi c
method” has been intimately related to talk about “science.” The spread of
scientifi c method as a widely used term refl ects changing ideas about sci-
ence and its role in the world; in particular, its growing prominence paral-
leled the emergence of science as a powerful category in the United States
and elsewhere over the last two centuries. Such high- profi le elements of
modern science talk as “science and religion,” “scientist,” and “pseudosci-
ence” grew in prominence over the last decades of the nineteenth century,
the same period of time that witnessed “the scientifi c method” becoming
a widely familiar phrase.^10 All of these expressions highlighted the grow-
ing distinctness of science. They eclipsed habits of talk about the scientifi c
that emphasized its continuities with other intellectual, social, and cul-
tural realms and shepherded its transformation from a category sometimes
still synonymous with general knowledge during the early 1800s to an un-
questionably special and distinct brand of information by the early 1900s.
Ultimately, those changes opened the door to attestations of the cultural
authority of science in contrast with other sorts of human activities.
THE REIGN OF BACON
We can set the stage for the emergence of scientifi c method and its role in
the creation of ideas about modern science by glancing at methodological
talk before the twentieth century. As fi gures 1–3 show, the term appeared
only rarely in the vocabularies of English speakers prior to the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. In several popular American periodicals be-
fore 1840, the number of articles that contained the phrase amounted to
only 0.3 percent of those articles that used the word “science” somewhere
in their texts. During the 1840s and 1850s, this percentage increased to
only about 1 percent.^11 Conversely, discussion of the proper method for
gaining knowledge has been traced back to the ancient Greeks, with a
major fl urry of activity during the seventeenth century.^12 Methodological
discussion also blossomed in Britain and the United States after 1829, the
year in which John Herschel published his Preliminary Discourse on the
Study of Natural Philosophy. The work of Herschel, one of the most promi-
nent English men of science during that period, in turn infl uenced the