Science
Last Update: Sunday, 22 December 2024 |
Note 1: Many of these items are online; links are given where they are known. Other items may also be online; an internet search should help you find them.
Note 2: In general, works are listed in chronological order. (This makes it easier to follow the historical development of ideas.)
§4.2: Science and Non-Science
§4.4.1: Description
§4.4.3: Prediction
§4.5: Instrumentalism vs. Realism:
§4.6: Scientific Theories:
and the debate in:
§4.7: "The" Scientific Method:
§4.8: Falsifiability:
On homeopathy — and a very good general survey of the nature of
pseudoscience — see:
§4.8.2: The Logic of Falsifiability:
§4.8.3: Problems with Falsifiability:
On the pessimistic meta-induction, see:
§4.9: Scientific Revolutions:
§4.10: Other Alternatives:
The AI researcher and sociologist M. Ross Quillian
made remarks similar to those of Feyerabend in:
§4.11: CS and Science:
Tedre and
Moisseinen 2014 is a
survey of the nature of experiments in science,
and whether CS is experimental in nature.
Gasarch, Bill (2024),
"Contrast an Episode of Columbo with the recent Nobel
Prizes",
Computational Complexity (blog, 20 October)
§4.11.1: Is CS a Science?:
Given that the passage is in a closing section of the chapter on the nature
of science, offering further considerations on whether CS is a science or
not, I suspect that what I wanted to say was that AI might be considered to
be a non-empirical science. But even that is not quite right, because
neural-network approaches are certainly more empirical than GOFAI approaches.
Exercise for the reader: Can you figure out what I might have had
in mind when I wrote that paragraph? :-)
. Cambridge
University Press, 2004, New York. Trans. by Gary Hatfield.
On Quantum Mechanics, see:
On the nature of scientific thinking in practice, see:
… she insisted that, though no number of positive affirmations can
establish a theory, one falsification can disprove it. "A single experiment
is not enough to confirm a hypothesis, but one alone is sufficient to
reject it," she wrote, two centuries before Karl Popper made the idea a
commonplace of twentieth-century science. (p. 62 of Gopnik's "Does the Enlightenment's Great Female Intellect Need
Rescuing?", The New Yorker (4 November 2024),
pp. 60–65)
Quillian's essay is an explanation, in terms of the communication of
information, of why the natural sciences are more
"effective" than the social sciences. Although written in the
early days of the World Wide Web, his paper has some
interesting implications for the role of social media in political discourse.
Copyright © 2023–2024 by
William J. Rapaport
(rapaport@buffalo.edu)
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/OR/A0fr04.html-20241222