Jessica Riskin

Jessica Riskin (born 1960) is an American historian of science and Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University.

• What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing? Authoritative definitions of “the scientific method” often state that it consists of a set of procedures including observation, experimentation, and the formation and testing of hypotheses by inductive and deductive reasoning. Such accounts, as a rule, ascribe science’s successes to the application of these procedures ever since the seventeenth century and the work of people such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. But neither Bacon nor Newton nor anyone else in the seventeenth century would have recognized the phrase; moreover, neither would have agreed with current standard definitions. Bacon, for instance, rejected deductive reasoning as the bad old Aristotelian approach, and Newton, author of one of the boldest hypotheses in the history of science—the universal aether—denied any role for hypotheses in his science, famously declaring “hypotheses non fingo” (I frame no hypotheses). [1]

• As a faculty member, I feel a great intellectual advantage in being in continual conversation with students, who arrive new and clear-eyed, asking foundational questions. I’ve found that giving them the benefit of my perspective means also accepting from them the benefit of theirs. [2]

• In Darwin’s version of Darwinism, natural selection played a key role, but so too did various living agencies, notably one that Darwin called “use and disuse” (using or failing to use a limb or organ, which, he assumed, would have heritable effects) and another that he named “sexual selection.” [3]

• Whereas Adam Smith worried about the confining and stultifying effects of commercial society, his 21st-century acolytes, cheerfully devoid of skepticism, see nothing but empowerment all the way. [4]