Naturalists are impressed by science; science is to be a model for philosophy. An important question for a naturalist is to ask what is distinctive about science. If we know that, we can begin to make some sense of the task of making philosophy more scientific. A traditional answer to the question of what is distinctive about science is that it employs a special method. Science makes use of special modes of inference, testing or experiment that set it apart from non-scientific disciplines such as astrology and homoeopathy. Methods, whether scientific or not, are normative. They tell you how you should do something. Norms, as we've seen, cause trouble for naturalists. Naturalists then have two difficult tasks when it comes to understanding science. First, they need to say what distinguishes the methods of science from those of non-science. Secondly, they need to show that scientific norms can be accommodated within a naturalistic world-view.

A tale of two methods

Traditional philosophy of science has offered us two very general answers to what is distinctive about science and its method – inductivism and hypothetico-deductivism.

Inductivists say that science begins by piecing together observations. From the data we put forward a tentative generalization. We then look for analogous phenomena in the world on the basis of which we can extend our generalizations. Once we have a generalization, we use it to make predictions. If the prediction matches the new data, the theory is confirmed.