Related papers: Epistemological Distinctions Between Science and H…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Statistical science (as opposed to mathematical statistics) involves far more than probability theory, for it requires realistic causal models of data generators - even for purely descriptive goals. Statistical decision theory requires more…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
In quantum mechanical experiments one distinguishes between the state of an experimental system and an observable measured in it. Heuristically, the distinction between states and observables is also suggested in scattering theory or when…
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
We identify points of difference between Invariant Set Theory and standard quantum theory, and show that these lead to noticeable differences in predictions between the two theories. We design a number of experiments to test which of these…
Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
For this study, we compared the attitudes and beliefs about science of physical science (physics and mathematics) and life science (biochemistry and biology) students at the beginning of their university degrees using the CLASS (Colorado…
Have our fundamental theories got time right? Does size really matter? Or is physics all in the eyes of the beholder? In this essay, we question the origin of time and scale by reevaluating the nature of measurement. We then argue for a…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…
However, the observations encompassed by classical physics excludes the observer from the physical reality, yet the deep-down understandung of nature --{\it the quantum theory}-- can not avoid the intrusion of observer into the measurement…
In various situations, decision makers face experts that may provide conflicting advice. This advice may be in the form of probabilistic forecasts over critical future events. We consider a setting where the two forecasters provide their…
This systematic mapping study consisted of tracking the scientific literature that addresses the issue of analogies as a didactic strategy in science teaching. An analogy can be understood as comparing an existing knowledge with a new…