Related papers: From "Not Wrong" to (Maybe) Right
Typical arguments against scientific misconduct generally fail to support current policies on research fraud: they may not prove wrong what is usually considered research misconduct and they tend to make wrong things that are not normally…
An influential argument for scientific realism posits that, if scientific theories were not true, their empirical success would be a coincidence. Here, I show that the false Drude's theory succeeds in explaining the Wiedemann-Franz law by…
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…
Doing research is fighting, what any other thing the human being could do? Fight against powers or to get powers, that depends on us. Science can be a revolution or deadlocked idleness. Still waters, without hitting the stones along their…
The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
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…
A popular scientific contribution should not contradict any established facts and ought to be understandable. I complied with both these requirements and am offering a sufficiently full introduction to probability theory. Furthermore, I…
The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field's successes, often in response to the field's widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this has yielded many misleading or false claims…
The goal of this paper is to experiment new math concepts and theories, especially if they run counter to the classical ones. To prove that contradiction is not a catastrophe, and to learn to handle it in an (un)usual way. To transform the…
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…
In this paper I argue that aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), a conception of natural science that I have defended at some length elsewhere, is a kind of synthesis of the views of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, but is also an improvement over the…
Most work on scholarly document processing assumes that the information processed is trustworthy and factually correct. However, this is not always the case. There are two core challenges, which should be addressed: 1) ensuring that…
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using ``simple and objective'' methods is increasingly prevalent today. The ``simple and…
Indirect evidence is crucial for successful statistical practice. Sometimes, however, it is better used informally. Future efforts should be directed toward understanding better the connection between statistical methods and scientific…
Consider the day when an invariant mass peak, roughly compatible with "the Higgs", begins to emerge, say at the LHC, ... and may you see that day. There will be a difference between discovery and scrutiny. The latter would involve an effort…