Related papers: A Theory of Scientific Practice
This Journal of Informetrics special issue aims to improve our understanding of the structure and dynamics of science by reviewing and advancing existing conceptualizations and models of scholarly activity. Several of these…
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
The scientific method is the cornerstone of human progress across all branches of the natural and applied sciences, from understanding the human body to explaining how the universe works. The scientific method is based on identifying…
Scientific evaluation is a determinant of how scientists, institutions and funders behave, and as such is a key element in the making of science. In this article, we propose an alternative to the current norm of evaluating research with…
This article is a theoretical study on the effectiveness of educational research in the context of Philosophy of science. This topic of discussion, in the area of educational research, has been the subject of intellectual debate and arises…
Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…
The philosophical foundations of statistics involve issues in theoretical statistics, such as goals and methods to meet these goals, and interpretation of the meaning of inference using statistics. They are related to the philosophy of…
We discuss some methodological aspects of the relation between physics and metaphysics by dealing specifically with the case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Our main claim is that current attempts to productively integrate quantum…
Reliability has long been treated as an engineering practice supported by testing, statistics and standards, yet its status as a scientific discipline remains unsettled. From a philosophical perspective, scientific truth is characterized by…
In contemporary theoretical physics, the powerful notion of symmetry stands for a web of intricate meanings among which I identify four clusters associated with the notion of transformation, comprehension, invariance and projection. While…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
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…
Reproducibility is a confused terminology. In this paper, I take a fundamental view on reproducibility rooted in the scientific method. The scientific method is analysed and characterised in order to develop the terminology required to…
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
Every scientific endeavour consists of (at least) two components: A hypothesis on the one hand and data on the other. There is always a more or less abstract level - some theory, a set of concepts, certain relations of ideas - and a…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…