The overarching goal of science is to deepen our understanding about the world we live in, and then to use this understanding, for example, to address social or medical problems. However, in order to pursue those goals effectively and efficiently, the scientific findings we base our actions on have to be credible. But how can we assess the credibility of research? Is a going through peer review enough, or being published? What if the study made it into in a “high-ranking” journal? Is that enough to deem findings credible?

Curate Science is committed to rewarding positive scientific behaviors, but does not punish questionable research practices or lower levels of transparency. Researchers are encouraged to adopt open and transparent practices, but to do so  at their own pace. LeBel explains, “we make it easy to get the most credit possible for conducting and reporting one's research only a little bit more transparently. That is, as transparent as you currently have time for and/or are comfortable with. For example, if you're uncomfortable publicly posting your data for an article, you could still earn credit by publicly posting your code and linking to it on Curate Science” (Only 1 transparency component is required for being added to the database).

Science relies on empirical evidence and testable explanations. By basing its conclusions on multiple lines of evidence drawn from experiments and observations, science seeks to build reliable knowledge and provide scientific explanations that people can use to better understand the world around them and inform their decision making.

Right. Scientific research is both an individual and a collective activity. Scientists may act on their own in gathering data and working out ideas. But they then need to convey to others their conclusions and the methods and evidence on which those conclusions are based. These observations and conclusions can be checked and extended by other scientists.

What is not Common Knowledge? Datasets generated by you or others. Statistics obtained from sources such as the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. References to studies done by others. Reference to specific dates, numbers, or facts the reader would not know unless s/he had done the research.

If you are familiar with the notion of “common knowledge” from earlier writing experiences, you may have noticed that its definition is easy to state, but can be hard to apply in a particular case. The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it out quite easily. Further, the term “common knowledge” carries the sense of “communal” knowledge—it is community information that no particular individual can fairly claim to own. One sign that something is community knowledge is that it is stated in 5 or more sources. So, if it’s known to educated people, or can be easily looked up, or appears in many sources, it is likely to be “common knowledge” and so does not need to be cited.

Because the notion of “common knowledge” is ambiguous and depends on context, you should always check with a professor or TF if you have any doubts. Some reference books will say “if in doubt, cite it,” but you don’t want to over-cite, so check with your readers to try to fix the line between common and specialized knowledge.

This advice about “common knowledge” is true for all disciplines—think about your audience and the course attitude, recognize when you’re writing as an expert, and always check with professors if you’re in doubt. The sciences, however, have a somewhat different notion of “common knowledge,” coming partly out of research practice and partly out of more collaborative work methods. Ideas, findings, and methodologies that are new knowledge (and therefore specialized rather than common knowledge) become old knowledge more quickly in the sciences. The answer, again, is to consider the messages you’re getting from the course about what concepts are common or foundational, and to check in with professors or TFs.

haped abstractions called vectors. Pondering Hilbert space makes me feel like a lump of dumb, decrepit flesh trapped in a squalid, 3-D prison. Far from exploring Hilbert space, I can’t even find a window through which to peer into it. I envision it as an immaterial paradise where luminescent cognoscenti glide to and fro, telepathically swapping witticisms about adjoint operators.

Reality, great sages have assured us, is essentially mathematical. Plato held that we and other things of this world are mere shadows of the sublime geometric forms that constitute reality. Galileo declared that “the great book of nature is written in mathematics.” We’re part of nature, aren’t we? So why does mathematics, once we get past natural numbers and basic arithmetic, feel so alien to most of us?

Physicists’ theories work. They predict the arc of planets and the flutter of electrons, and they have spawned smartphones, H-bombs and—well, what more do we need? But scientists, and especially physicists, aren’t just seeking practical advances. They’re after Truth. They want to believe that their theories are correct—exclusively correct—representations of nature. Physicists share this craving with religious folk, who need to believe that their path to salvation is the One True Path.

Common knowledge is that which I know and that which I know everyone else knows. That, at least, is the easiest way to put it for my purposes here, which is how a large number of people came to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election—and subsequently constructed an intellectual edifice around this conviction that led to the January 6 Capitol riots.

David Lewis gave the most well-known account of common knowledge in 1969:Let us say that it is common knowledge in a population P that X if and only if some state of affairs A holds such that:1. Everyone in P has reason to believe that A holds. 2. A indicates to everyone in P that everyone in P has reason to believe that A holds. 3. A indicates to everyone in P that X.David Lewis, Convention (1969)In other words, in an imagined group of people P, you get common knowledge of “Trump won the election” only if you have a situation in which every member of the group is not only given reason to believe that Trump won the election, but also that everyone else in the group has reason to believe (and likely the same reason to believe) that Trump won the election.

Unfortunately, though there are epidemiological experts and economic experts, and psychological experts and sociological experts, there are no scientists whose expertise encompasses epidemiology, economics, psychology, and sociology. 

It is, moreover, true that scientific consensus is often fleeting and regularly overturned, and that, in any case, consensus is neither unanimity nor a marker of infallibility. But the problem that we raise would remain a problem even if scientists were unanimous and infallible in their respective fields, and omnipotent about particular circumstances of time and place. 

Scientists learn their trades through specialized study of specific phenomena, which they investigate in isolation under carefully controlled conditions, holding other factors constant. The best scientists in their fields are experts about a very limited range of phenomena that are assumed not to interact or integrate with any other kinds of phenomena. Outside of the graduate seminar and theoretical model, be

Why ask “Why trust science?” When many people worry about the safety of genetically modified food, parents resist the advice of pediatricians to vaccinate their children against common childhood diseases, religious people still say they take the earth to be fewer than 10,000 years old, and the president of the United States declares climate change to be a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, public trust in scientific research would seem to be in dire straits. The time is ripe for reassurance. Even to pose the question indicates that something has gone wrong.

We need to know why to trust science, then, in part because we need to know why to believe the scientific consensus on climate change, and Naomi Oreskes is the obvious person to provide the answer. Her new book takes up the question explicitly; it grows out of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Princeton in late 2016, and includes commentaries by a historian, a philosopher, and three social scientists.

But it is not just conservatives who question scientific authority in the United States. Alarm at many applications of biological research, for example, crosses party lines. This impulse usually targets genetic engineering and biotechnology, but it also fosters skepticism toward vaccination and other medical practices. Across the political spectrum, citizens tend to pick and choose among scientific theories and applications based on preexisting commitments. They are frequently suspicious of basic research procedures as well; many believe that peer review and other internal policing mechanisms fail to remove powerful biases. Conservatives often charge that peer review enforces liberal groupthink, while some progressives say it leaves conventional social norms unexamined.

Even as individuals, scientists face growing skepticism. Concern about scientific misconduct is widespread, and most Americans doubt that the perpetrators face serious repercussions. Significant numbers trust the experts who apply knowledge more than those who produce it.

The logic is supposed to be that only someone of Gorman’s race, and optimally gender, can effectively translate her expression into another language. But is that true? And are we not denying Gorman and black people basic humanity in – if I may jump the gun – pretending that it is?

Notice I didn’t mention Shakespeare translated into other languages. According to the Critical Race Theory paradigm that informs this performative take on translating Gorman, Shakespeare being a white man means that white translators of his work are akin to him, while non-white ones, minted in a world where they must always grapple with whiteness “centered,” are perfect bilinguals of a sort.

Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it

pper’s answer emerged. Popper was born just after the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna—the birthplace of psychoanalysis—and received his doctorate in psychology in 1928. In the early 1920s Popper volunteered in the clinics of Alfred Adler, who had split with his former mentor, the creator of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Precocious interest in psychoanalysis, and his subsequent rejection of it, were crucial in Popper’s later formulation of his philosophical views on science.

At first, Popper was quite taken with logical empiricism, but he would diverge from the mainstream of the movement and develop his own framework for understanding scientific thought in his two influential books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, revised and translated to English in 1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1962). Popper claimed to have formulated his initial ideas about demarcation in 1919, when he was seventeen years old. He had, he writes, “wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”

inking the different Areas of Knowledge (AOK) with different Ways of Knowing (WOK) can be quite challenging at times. I now attempted to link History with Language, Logics, Emotion and Sense Perception.

Does the way (the language) that certain historical events are presented in history books influence the way that the reader understands these events? What role does loaded language play when talking about historical events? What role do connotation and denotation play when talking about historical events? How can language introduce bias into historical accounts? How does language help or hinder the interpretation of historical facts?

recently read an interesting poem by the German poet and playwright Berthold Brecht – a poem which got me thinking. You see, this is one of the TOK illnesses, you start to see TOK everywhere, and also in poetry. Continue reading »

As a result we come to know and to form justified beliefs about a range of topics. We also seem to keep these beliefs. How? The natural answer is: by memory. It is not too hard to understand that memory allows us to retain information. It is harder to understand exactly how memory allows us to retain knowledge and reasons for our beliefs. Learning is largely a matter of acquiring reasons for changing views. But how do we keep reasons for the views we keep? The epistemology of memory concerns memory’s role in our having knowledge and justification. This branch of epistemology, unlike nearly all other branches, addresses our having knowledge and justification over time.

Traditionally, philosophers have likened memory to a storehouse or a recording device. In the Theaetetus, Plato claims that the mind is analogous to a wax tablet. To perceive is to make an impression on the tablet, leaving behind an exact image or representation of what was perceived. Memory keeps the images and forgetting is a matter of losing them. In his Confessions, Augustine says perception deposits images of objects into the storehouse of memory and the process of recalling is the process of retrieving these deposits. Locke and Hume tell much the same story, as do many other philosophers up through the 20th century.

All knowledge comes from somewhere. Even if we say it is innate (comes from within us) we still have to say how that knowledge appears. The Ways of Knowing are what they sound like, the methods through which knowledge becomes apparent to us. In the IB there are eight different ways of knowing: Language, Sense perception, Emotion, Reason, Imagination, Faith, Intuition and Memory. Although this might seem like a lot, the good news is that the for the IB you’re only really advised to study four of them in depth (although it’s worth knowing how each of them works).

This quote from author Olivia Fox Cabane points out the power of the human imagination. What is being described here is the what we traditionally call imagination: the ability to form a mental representation of a sense experience without the normal stimulus. There is another form of imagination, however. Propositional imagining: is the idea of ‘imagining that’ things were different than they are, for example that the cold war had never ended.

MEMORY Your memory plays perhaps a more important role in the acquisition of knowledge than you may realise. Our memory shapes our personal and shared identity. A large amount of second hand knowledge has been passed on through language to become part of the shared knowledge of knowledge communitie

Even though memories can be biased and blurry, they do play an important role in the construction of knowledge. Consider how you would know anything without memory

"We can invent only with memory." (Alphonse Karr) “Memory and imagination help [a man] as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.” (William Morris) “Memory feeds imagination.” (Amy Tan) “Memory is imagination in reverse.” (Stephen Evans) "Memory is deceptive because it is coloured by today’s events." (Albert Einstein)

Memory is the faculty of the mind by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).

A very basic explanation would say that memory is a process of: Perceiving something Information from your perception is sent to your working memory. Information can be retrieved from here (remembered).  A fraction of the informati

Sense-perception has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the Problem of Perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what we ordinarily understand it to be, an openness to and awareness of the world? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of experience in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge.

According to Awareness, we are sometimes perceptually aware of ordinary mind-independent objects in perceptual experience. Such awareness can come from veridical experiences—cases in which one perceives an object for what it is. But it can also come from illusory experiences. For we think of an illusion as “any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is” Smith (2002: 23). For example, a white wall seen in yellow light can look yellow to one. (In such cases it is not necessary that one is deceived into believing that things are other than they are). The argument from illusion, in a radical form, aims to show that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary objects. Many things have been called “the argument from illusion”