Related papers: Epistemological Distinctions Between Science and H…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
An attempt to redefine science in the 21st century (BK Jennings, On the Nature of Science, Physics in Canada, 63(7) 2007) has abandoned traditional notions of natural law and objective reality, blurred the distinctions between natural…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
The purpose of this note is to explain what is "analytical history", a modular and testable analysis of historical events introduced in a book published in 2002 (Roehner and Syme 2002). Broadly speaking, it is a comparative methodology for…
This paper proposes a new definition of science based on the distinction between the activity of scientists and the product of that activity: the former is denoted (lower-case) science and the latter (upper-case) Science. These definitions…
Astrobiology is a scientific discipline that studies life in the Universe. We call it a discipline and not a science because some authors have cast doubts over its epistemological status by calling it 'a science without an object of study'.…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
A 21st century view of the nature of science is presented. It attempts to show how a consistent description of science and scientific progress can be given. Science advances through a sequence of models with progressively greater predictive…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
This paper avers that science is not demarcated from other disciplines by a specific unique methodology, but by its specific scientific rationality and rational grounds. In this context, the notion and structure of scientific reason are…
Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion-does the belief in question correspond…
Because there are similarities between the evaluation of alternative stories in criminal trials and the evaluation of scientific theories, scholars have looked to literature in epistemology and the philosophy of science for insights on the…
We lay the groundwork for a formal framework that studies scientific theories and can serve as a unified foundation for the different theories within physics. We define a scientific theory as a set of verifiable statements, assertions that…
Although we accept that Physics is, as a last resort, an experimental science, the relationship between theory and experiment is far away from being trivial. Any experiment is always explained within a determinate theoretical context and,…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Data science is the business of learning from data, which is traditionally the business of statistics. Data science, however, is often understood as a broader, task-driven and computationally-oriented version of statistics. Both the term…