5 ms·
To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or circumstanc
by vph 10y ago
To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or circumstances with human subjects, it's very expensive or even infeasible to have well controlled repeated experiments.
- Godel_unicode 10y agoIf you don't have well controlled, repeatable experiments (a.k.a. the scientific method) are you actually doing science? I think we should come up with another word for these types of one-off studies.
- gumby 10y agoMany fields advance without solid well controlled, repeatable experiments, at least through various stages of development: cosmology, geology, most of medicine, philosophy, science of mind, etc. You don't consider those all "science"? There's more to science than Bacon.
- freyr 10y agoThose fields have scientific and non-scientific components. The non-scientific parts are not science.
- gumby 10y agoYour statement is tautological. You might want to read up on epistemology and the philosophy of science -- I would start with Karl Popper. As I said, Bacon is not the definition of science. Bizarrely, my unremarkable comment was downvoted!
- Godel_unicode 10y agoI believe you were downvoted because you were factually inaccurate about the presence of scientific studies in medicine especially. Controlled, double-blind, repeatable (from a population standpoint) studies are something medicine is good at. Note that there are counter-examples of medical studies which were poorly conducted, but realize that they are the exception not the rule.
- freyr 10y ago> Your statement is tautological You want to label fields that have both scientific components and non-scientific components (in varying proportions) as "science." The point of my statement is that some of those fields have scientific aspects, and there may be sub-fields I'd categorize as "science," but I wouldn't categorize the field as a whole as "science."