Related papers: Science Under Attack
Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…
In this paper we illustrate the tension between mainstream 'normal', 'unorthodox' and 'fringe' science that is the focus of two ongoing projects that are analysing the full ecology of physics knowledge. The first project concentrates on…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
In their position paper entitled "Towards a new, complexity science of learning and education", Jorg et al. (2007) argue that educational research is in crisis. In their opinion, the transdisciplinary and interdiscursive approach of…
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
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…
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…
This research presents the results of a comparative analysis of the links between religious practices and beliefs and levels of scientific knowledge. Based on secondary analyses of survey data in the European Union (Eurobarometers 2005 and…
This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and…
As ontologies proliferate and automatic reasoners become more powerful, the problem of protecting sensitive information becomes more serious. In particular, as facts can be inferred from other facts, it becomes increasingly likely that…
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…
While data science has emerged as a contentious new scientific field, enormous debates and discussions have been made on it why we need data science and what makes it as a science. In reviewing hundreds of pieces of literature which include…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
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…
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…
Critically growing problems of fundamental science organisation and content are analysed with examples from physics and emerging interdisciplinary fields. Their origin is specified and new science structure (organisation and content) is…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
Scientific understanding is a fundamental goal of science, allowing us to explain the world. There is currently no good way to measure the scientific understanding of agents, whether these be humans or Artificial Intelligence systems.…
Datacentric enthusiasm is growing strong across a variety of domains. Whilst data science asks unquestionably exciting scientific questions, we argue that its contributions should not be extrapolated from the scientific context in which…