相关论文: On the Nature of Science

Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…

Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…

Machine learning is increasingly transforming various scientific fields, enabled by advancements in computational power and access to large data sets from experiments and simulations. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow in…

The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our…

Science consists on conceiving hypotheses, confronting them with empirical evidence, and keeping only hypotheses which have not yet been falsified. Under deductive reasoning they are conceived in view of a theory and confronted with…

Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…

The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…

Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…

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…

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping how we approach scientific discovery, not by replacing established methods but by extending what researchers can probe, predict, and design. In this roadmap we provide a…

The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…

The paper discusses the fundamental characteristics distinguishing the natural and social systems from each other. It considers in detail the basic approaches, prospects, and possibilities of constructing mathematical description for social…

First, this paper broaches the definition of science and the epistemic yield of tenets and approaches: phenomenological (descriptive only), well-founded (solid first principles, conducive to deep understanding), provisional (falsifiable if…

Oscillations are observed in all branches of science and culture, ranging from the behavior of ele-mentary particles, atoms, molecules in simple chemical or physical systems or even in complex organisms, up to oscillations of the behavior…

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…

It has been shown at other occasions that recent results of modern physics can be used to shed some more light onto the foundations of the world, provided the actual task of philosophy is being re-interpreted in terms of a theory which is…

The brain is a powerful tool used to achieve amazing feats. There have been several significant advances in neuroscience and artificial brain research in the past two decades. This article is a review of such advances, ranging from the…

In this article we present and discuss a didactic activity that combines epistemic aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and a simple, relatively low-cost experiment on electromagnetic induction. The aim of the activity is for students to…

Information theory is a statistical theory concerned with the relative state of detectors and physical systems. As a consequence, the classical framework of Shannon needs to be extended to deal with quantum detectors, possibly moving at…

Scientific realism is the philosophical stance that science tracks truth, in particular in its depiction of the world's ontology. Ontologically, this involves a commitment to the existence of entities posited by our best scientific…