328 Thurs
in fi elds where emotions run high and data are scarce.”^77 Amidst recent
debates over intelligent design, which claims to detect clear evidence of
conscious engineering in living things, scientifi c method has rarely served
as a bridge to involve ordinary people in science or to export the intel-
lectual power of science beyond the limits of the purely scientifi c world.
Fred Spilhaus, executive director of the American Geophysical Union,
claimed in 2005 that scientists and students were “bound by the scien-
tifi c method” inside “their laboratories and science classrooms,” but once
outside of these special locations they could “believe what they choose
about the origins of life.”^78 Alternatively, high- profi le advocates of intel-
ligent design, such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, undermined
a formal notion of scientifi c method, quoting physicist Percy Bridgman’s
quip that “the scientifi c method, as far as it is a method, is nothing more
than doing one’s damndest with one’s mind, no holds barred” and citing
Feyerabend’s Against Method.^79
Similar kinds of questioning and controversy had weakened induc-
tive, Baconian rhetoric a century earlier. But factors more particular to the
late twentieth century were at work too. In particular, scientifi c method
was increasingly obscured by the same scientifi c boundaries it helped to
create and exploit. In one sense it is a victim of its own success. Insofar
as widespread invocation of scientifi c method resembled an advertising
campaign on behalf of a well- bounded concept of science, then by the
mid- 1900s, the product had already been largely sold. Scientifi c method
had already done its job in helping to construct, maintain, and make
sense of the boundaries of science during a crucial transition from one
kind of enterprise to another—that is, from an individual, accessible, and
often self- supported practice to a more professional, technical, and well-
bounded one supported by institutions such as universities, government
and industry. The increasing security of professional, especially natural,
scientists during the twentieth century left scientifi c method primarily
in the hands of those wrangling about the status of fi elds on the mar-
gins, from social science in the decades after 1920 to parapsychology and
UFOlogy after World War II and intelligent design in the present day. The
larger cultural context of postwar American science- talk also played an
important role in the fate of scientifi c method. Its continued invocation
has taken place in a public culture largely structured by the mechanisms
and assumptions of advertising. In such a framework, words and images
gain power through endless repetition but for that reason seem to have
limited lifetimes. One can only ask where the beef is for so long before
people become annoyed.
Over the last few decades, scientifi c method has also been displaced