The application of cognitive
science—psychology, neuroscience, artificial
intelligence, linguistics—to the
study of how human minds actually practice the scientific method. The cognitive sciences of the scientific method examine the cognitive processes underlying scientific reasoning: how scientists form hypotheses, how they evaluate evidence, how they detect patterns, how they manage uncertainty, how they overcome biases, how they generate insights. They also investigate how scientific thinking can be enhanced—through training, through tools, through collaboration—and how it can go wrong. The cognitive sciences of the scientific method reveal that method is not just a
set of rules but a
set of cognitive practices—practices that recruit specific mental capacities, that can be learned and improved, and that are shaped by the architecture of the human mind.
Cognitive Sciences of the Scientific Method Example: "His cognitive sciences of the scientific method research used fMRI to
study scientists' brains while they evaluated
data—showing that even expert physicists
show confirmation bias at the neural level. The method can't eliminate bias because the method runs on brains that have bias built in."