"The scientific method does not exist. But “the scientific method” does. This is a distinction with a difference. Scientists will tell you that there is no single method that characterizes all that they do, much less a simple set of steps that binds everything called “science” together. Scientific labor is complex and diverse, brutally difficult and impossible to encapsulate. If you think you have found a unifying principle, no doubt it leaves out some important aspect of scientific thinking or excludes a branch of what we now call the sciences. In the unlikely event that it does not, then the principle is probably overly inclusive, capturing too many practices to mean much at all. And it is not just scientists who doubt whether such a method exists. Historians are skeptical of it as well—for good reason. One glance back at the history of science reveals even more diversity than exists today, making a single set of steps uniting all the sciences that much harder to imagine. Scientists and historians do not always agree, but they do on this: there is no such thing as the scientific method, and there never was. And yet, “the scientific method” is alive and well. The idea of a set of steps that justifies science’s authority has persisted in the face of constant denials of its existence. Why? Because “the scientific method” is a myth—and myths are powerful things. How we talk about science, how we account for its origins and argue for its results, instills mythical authority in some claims and invalidates others. The myth of “the scientific method” matters, even if (or perhaps, because) the reality it attests is ambiguous at best. Between the doubtful existence of the scientific method and the unquestionable power of “the scientific method,” a history remains to be told. Doing so means exploring how these two phenomena interact, how the way we talk about thinking has shaped the quiet, even tacit process of thinking itself. As the historian of science Steven Shapin has argued: “A practice without an attendant myth is likely to be weak, hard to justify, hard even to make visible as a distinct kind of activity.” If Shapin is right that we are now “dubious of claims that there is anything like ‘a scientific method’—a coherent, universal, and efficacious set of procedures for making scientific knowledge,” we must recognize the power that inheres in the myth of such a method and its complex relationship to how science is actually done."