Category Archives: Scientific method

Pseudo-science versus skepticism

Posted on February 21, 2011 by | 233 comments

by Judith Curry

John Beddington, Chief Science Advisor to the UK government, goes to war against bad science (h/t BishopHill, dated Feb 14):

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Posted in Scientific method

Believing Science

Posted on February 20, 2011 by | 336 comments
by Thomas G. Brown
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At six, my son began his dinosaur phase.  Like many precocious youngsters, he had the multisyllabic names mastered, could cite the diet of the dinosaurs and in some cases knew the height and weight.   At a time when Jurassic Park was still on the drawing board,  my son lived and breathed dinosaurs.  Somewhere in our attic collection sits a set of prehistoric creatures fashioned in molded plastic — figures that my son never doubted were true representations of the original.
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Long before computer aided reconstruction of skeletal remains became possible, artistic representation of scientific conjecture has been used to ignite the imagination of a public eager for scientific stories while unable (or unwilling) to grasp the methods used in the analysis.  And textbook editors have often found the artists’ depictions more compelling than the scientific results–the most enduring images of dinosaurs are not the fossils, bones and dating methods but the flesh and blood fiction of a Jurassic Park. And the enduring images of evolution are not the robustness of genetics and the amazing adaptation of species in response to environmental changes.   Instead,  the general public is treated to artistic representations of evolutionary ancestry that may, or may not, fit the latest genome research.
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Posted in Communication, Scientific method

Epistemology of Disagreement

Posted on February 18, 2011 by | 284 comments

by Judith Curry

For the paper that I am writing on uncertainty and the IPCC, I am including a section on “Consensus, Disagreement, and Argument Justification.”  While googling around on this this topic, I encountered a fascinating body of work by Princeton philosopher Thomas Kelly, which I find mind-blowingly relevant to the climate conflict.  Here are some excerpts from a few of his papers that I found to be particularly provocative.

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Posted in Scientific method

Lies, damned lies, and science(?)

Posted on December 14, 2010 by | 199 comments

by Judith Curry

A fascinating article appeared in the November issue of the Atlantic, entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.”  The article is an absolute must read, about the prevalance of (unconscious) bias in medical science.

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199 Comments

Posted in Scientific method, Sociology of science

Waving the Italian flag. Part I: uncertainty and pedigree

Posted on November 28, 2010 by | 95 comments

by Judith Curry

The Italian flag (IF) is a representation of three-valued logic in which evidence for a proposition is represented as green, evidence against is represented as red, and residual uncertainty is represented as white.  The white area reflects uncommitted belief, which can be associated with uncertainty in evidence or unknowns.

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Posted in Scientific method, Uncertainty

The Principles of Reasoning. Part II: Solving the Problem of Induction

Posted on November 25, 2010 by | 131 comments

by Terry Oldberg

This essay continues the argument which I initiated in Part I. To summarize, in Part I, I described a kind of model that was a procedure for making inferences. One kind of inference was a prediction from a known state of nature called a “condition” to an uncertain state of nature called an “outcome.” Conditions and outcomes were both examples of abstracted states. I pointed out that sets of conditions of infinite number could be defined on the Cartesian product space of a model’s independent variables and that each of these sets defined a different model. Thus, models of infinite number were candidates for being built.

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131 Comments

Posted in Scientific method

Principles of Reasoning. Part I: Abstraction

Posted on November 22, 2010 by | 161 comments

By Terry Oldberg

Introduction

In building climate models, climatologists generalize. Can the means by which they generalize be improved?

Yes they can. The means can be improved by replacement of intuitive rules of thumb called “heuristics” by the principles of reasoning.

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161 Comments

Posted in Scientific method

The Scientific Method

Posted on November 9, 2010 by | 346 comments

by Mike Zajko

This post addresses an issue that has been coming up recurrently since the start of this blog. I hope it might be a way to step back and reflect on the nature of science in general, as well as a place where we can think about the methods applied in climate science more specifically. I’ve broken the following down into sections that can be read together or individually. I’m hoping for come good discussion of these and additional approaches to the scientific method.

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346 Comments

Posted in Scientific method