Scientific Methods

I recently had a conversation with a scientist colleague about the phrase "the scientific method." I objected to the definite article, on the grounds that if you describe "the" scientific method broadly enough to include all scientific inquiry -- historical methods in paleontology and experimental ones in physics, for example -- it will be so broad as to cover many forms of inquiry -- some kinds of journalism, say, or the work of police detectives -- that are not science, at least by conventional description.

Good, systematic inquiry in any field shares certain epistemic and characterological features, in that it is designed and bids fair to get at the truth of some question and honestly attempts to put that goal before any other. Specific fields of inquiry, including the special sciences, have crafted particular methodologies within those general parameters that are suited to their objects of study -- purpose-built tools of their trades. Thus it is useful to speak of the methods of physicists or biologists, and proper to call these methods scientific, but probably tendentious to speak of one single method that demarcates the work of the sciences from that of all other endeavors.

In the second part of Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates proposes the method of "division and collection" as indispensable to the true art of rhetoric (and not incidentally perhaps a modification of his earlier theory of forms). Such a method might make knowledge more accessible, and hence represent a softening of Socratic aporia. He describes it as the method of philosophy; might it be the basis of what we now call "the scientific method?"