Related papers: What is Wrong With Aim-Oriented Empiricism?
Perhaps one of the most intriguing questions in philosophy concerns the true nature of external reality. In this paper, we discuss some of the theories that have been put forth regarding the nature of reality and of our perceived universe.…
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work very well in the Earth's immediate neighborhood, but arguments abound that it needs modification at very small and/or…
Various research initiatives try to utilize the operational principles of organisms and brains to develop alternative, biologically inspired computing paradigms and artificial cognitive systems. This paper reviews key features of the…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
The American scientific community is reeling from funding cuts and policy directives that will debilitate scientific research and education. The underlying hostilities fueling these attacks have intensified in recent years as the COVID-19…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
The observation of the nature and world represents the main source of human knowledge on the basis of our reason. At the present it is also the use of precise measurement approaches, which may contribute significantly to the knowledge of…
Data science is not a science. It is a research paradigm with an unfathomed scope, scale, complexity, and power for knowledge discovery that is not otherwise possible and can be beyond human reasoning. It is changing our world practically…
Avoiding harm is an uncontroversial aim of personalized medicine and other epidemiologic initiatives. However, the precise mathematical translation of "harm" is disputable. Here we use a formal causal language to study common, but distinct,…
Many domains of science have developed complex simulations to describe phenomena of interest. While these simulations provide high-fidelity models, they are poorly suited for inference and lead to challenging inverse problems. We review the…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
This paper explores the options available to the anti-realist to defend a Quinean empirical under-determination thesis using examples of dualities. I first explicate a version of the empirical under-determination thesis that can be brought…
Academic research projects receive hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment each year. They complement business research projects by focusing on the generation of new foundational knowledge and addressing societal…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
The text points out that one of the main contradictions of quantum realism, which is particularly relevant to the social sciences, is the tension between the existence of an observer-independent reality and the idea that this reality is…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…
Brain science and artificial intelligence have made great progress toward the understanding and engineering of the human mind. The progress has accelerated significantly since the turn of the century thanks to new methods for probing the…
One aspect of the algorithmic lens in theoretical computer science is a view on other scientific disciplines that focuses on satisfactory solutions that adhere to real-world constraints, as opposed to solutions that would be optimal…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…