Related papers: Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
In this paper, we reject commonly accepted views on fundamentality in science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction to isolate the alleged fundamental entities. We do not introduce any new scientific methodology, but…
Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…
Measurement outcomes provide data for a physical theory. Unless they are objective they support no objective scientific knowledge. So the outcome of a quantum measurement must be an objective physical fact. But recent arguments purport to…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
We report on a pedagogical experiment to make mathematics easy by changing its philosophy. The Western philosophy of math originated in religious beliefs about mathesis, cursed by the church. Later, mathematics was "reinterpreted", in a…
Open Science aims to foster openness and collaboration in research, leading to more significant scientific and social impact. However, practicing Open Science comes with several challenges and is currently not properly rewarded. In this…
"Rigor" is an often sought after but ill-defined concept in education. This work reviews several models of rigor from current literature before proposing a tool which is used to analyze science education throughout history. The…
Academia owes the public a fresh look at its education and research mission. First and foremost, researchers must communicate the results of their latest studies in a truthful and meaningful way. Second, the traditional boundaries among…
This article reviews and develops an epistemological tradition in the philosophy of science, known as convergentism, which holds that inference methods should be assessed based on their ability to converge to the truth across a range of…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…
We analyse the implications of the closure of the physical for experiments in the scientific study of consciousness when all the details are considered, especially how measurement results relate to physical events. It turns out that the…
A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming astronomical research, yet the scientific community has largely treated this transformation as an engineering challenge rather than an epistemological one. This perspective article argues that…
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…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…