A partial index of discussion notes is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/AREADME.html
Also
http://tinyurl.com/CogMisc/AREADME.html
I think your view of the scientific method is very reasonable, and describes achievements in certain fields like physics very well. But in other fields in which there is no generally-accepted overarching framework for how the system works -- fields like medicine, all the social sciences, and cognitive science -- a different approach is usually taken. That approach is to manipulate a couple of independent variables to look for evidence of one or two causal relations.I responded:
Contrast what Kenneth Craik (who tragically died very young a few years later) did in his little book The Nature of Explanation, published 1943.
He is best known for reflecting on various features of the competences of (some) animals and asking 'How is that possible', and coming up with speculative answers whose complexity is derived from the complexity of what needs to be explained. The best known example is his suggestion that some animals can build models of portions of the environment and use them to predict events in the environment "...a process which saves time, expense, and even life".(page 82).
I think he missed some subtleties that led to the evolution of mathematical reasoning capabilities, but that's a long story.
The book also includes a less well known extended discussions of how various kinds of abstract information about structures, processes and relationships in the environment might be represented in known types of physical brain mechanisms, e.g. proposing that not absolute magnitudes but changes and orderings are mostly used.
That's an idea I have been exploring for the last few years, having completely forgotten that I must have read it in Craik 40-50 years ago.
He was writing long before AI vision researchers got their scientific vision distorted by the availability of electronic cameras with rectangular grids for retinas (frame-grabbers).
So what you say scientists can't do has been done and is being done and should be done. But it requires a new sort of education for young psychologists, biologists, etc.
The Computer Revolution in PhilosophySome of the ideas were developed further in this 1996 paper:
http://tinyurl.com/BhamCog/crp/chap2.html
CHAPTER 2: WHAT ARE THE AIMS OF SCIENCE?
http://tinyurl.com/BhamCog/96-99.html#15
Actual Possibilities, in Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proc. 5th Int. Conf. (KR `96),
Eds. L.C. Aiello and S.C. Shapiro, 1996, pp. 627--638,
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham