section_path: History
section_name: History
paragraph_text: History
  
  The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodology of scientific inquiry, as distinct from the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straightforward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philosophers and scientists have argued for the primacy of one or another approach to establishing scientific knowledge.
  
  Different early expressions of empiricism and the scientific method can be found throughout history, for instance with the ancient Stoics, Epicurus, Alhazen, Avicenna, Al-Biruni, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham.
  
  In the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries some of the most important developments were the furthering of empiricism by Francis Bacon and Robert Hooke, the rationalist approach described by René Descartes and inductivism, brought to particular prominence by Isaac Newton and those who followed him. Experiments were advocated by Francis Bacon, and performed by Giambattista della Porta, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. There was particular development aided by theoretical works by a skeptic Francisco Sanches, by idealists as well as empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
  
  A sea voyage from America to Europe afforded C. S. Peirce the distance to clarify his ideas, gradually resulting in the hypothetico-deductive model. Formulated in the 20th century, the model has undergone significant revision since first proposed.
  
  The term "scientific method" emerged in the 19th century, as a result of significant institutional development of science, and terminologies establishing clear boundaries between science and non-science, such as "scientist" and "pseudoscience", appearing. Throughout the 1830s and 1850s, when Baconianism was popular, naturalists like William Whewell, John Herschel and John Stuart Mill engaged in debates over "induction" and "facts" and were focused on how to generate knowledge. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a debate over realism vs. antirealism was conducted as powerful scientific theories extended beyond the realm of the observable.