The Scientific Method as Natural Language Chain-of-Thought

This document outlines a structured, iterative framework for scientific inquiry designed for both human and artificial reasoners. It presents the scientific method as a 'chain-of-thought'—a sequence of logical stages including observation, grounding, hypothesis formation, experimental design, data collection, analysis, conclusion evaluation, and community review. The framework emphasizes epistemic hygiene, falsifiability, and the explicit separation of raw observation from interpretation to minimize hallucination and bias in reasoning processes.