Related papers: The Social Abduction of Science
Machine learning and deep learning techniques are contributing much to the advancement of science. Their powerful predictive capabilities appear in numerous disciplines, including chaotic dynamics, but they miss understanding. The main…
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…
Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…
Abductive reasoning starts from some observations and aims at finding the most plausible explanation for these observations. To perform abduction, humans often make use of temporal and causal inferences, and knowledge about how some…
Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning,…
Logical bilateralism challenges traditional concepts of logic by treating assertion and denial as independent yet opposed acts. While initially devised to justify classical logic, its constructive variants show that both acts admit…
In their account of theory change in logic, Aberdein and Read distinguish 'glorious' from 'inglorious' revolutions--only the former preserves all 'the key components of a theory' [1]. A widespread view, expressed in these terms, is that…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly applied to scientific research, but its benefits remain unevenly distributed across different communities and disciplines. While technical challenges such as limited data, fragmented…
Using large-scale citation data and a breakthrough metric, the study systematically evaluates the inevitability of scientific breakthroughs. We find that scientific breakthroughs emerge as multiple discoveries rather than singular events.…
When teaching an elementary logic course to students who have a general scientific background but have never been exposed to logic, we have to face the problem that the notions of deduction rule and of derivation are completely new to them,…
Scientific investigation procedures have been evolving to follow an ever-changing cultural landscape, the sophistication of the technology available and an ever-growing knowledge base. This continuous evolution brought investigation…
Recent efforts to improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused on integrating formal logic solvers within neurosymbolic frameworks. A key challenge is that formal solvers lack commonsense world knowledge,…
Social contagion has been studied in various contexts. Many instances of social contagion can be modeled as an infection process where a specific state (adoption of product, fad, knowledge, behavior, etc.) spreads from individual to…
Hypothetical induction is recognized as the main reasoning type when scientists make observations about the world and try to propose hypotheses to explain those observations. Past research on hypothetical induction is under a constrained…
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…
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…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Argumentation is a non-monotonic process. This reflects the fact that argumentation involves uncertain information, and so new information can cause a change in the conclusions drawn. However, the base logic does not need to be…
Scientific social stratification is a classic theme in the sociology of science. The deep integration of social media has bridged the gap between scientometrics and sociology of science. This study comprehensively analyzes the impact of…
Scientists have long aimed to discover meaningful formulae which accurately describe experimental data. A common approach is to manually create mathematical models of natural phenomena using domain knowledge, and then fit these models to…