book chapter 1 (3) Flashcards
normative claim
says how things ought to be
Descriptive claim
attempts to describe how things in fact are, without making any value judgements
confirmation bias
The tendency we all have to look for, interpret, and recall evidence in ways that confirm and do not challenge our existing beliefs
observer-expectancy effect
When a scientists expectation lead her to unconsciously influence the behavior of experimental subjects
e.g. Hans the horse which could do mathematics
plagiarism
Consists of presenting somebody elses ideas, scientific results, or words as ones own work, intentionally or unintentionally, by not giving proper credit
conflicts of interest
Financial or personal gains that may inappropriately influence scientific reserch, results or publications. Scientists are obligated to disclose any potential conflicts of interest
ways to promotie scientific integrity:
Holding scientists accountable for their work.
Scientists should be open to criticisms of their work and to new ideas
(Governing scientists as individuals is) ingenuity (many ideas wouldve never come along without some creativity; most claims will be proven wrong anyways
who (if not individual scientists) generate knowledge
Scientific communities
No matter how good the individual; science cannot be fully protected against the flaws inherent to human reasoning. Even the best
one primal social norm in science is
Trust. Scientists trust in one another is the glue of scientific communities
For example: collaborative projects on climate change involve scientists with a range in different expertise, including climatologists, ecologists, physicists, statisticians and economists. None of these scientists alone possesses comprehensive expertise to understand the full range of evidence that bears on our understanding of anthropogenic climate change
Replication
Doing it over and over and still getting the same results
individual norms that protect against bias and flaws in reasoning
Integrity
openness (to criticism)
Ingenuity
Social norms that protect against bias and flaws in reasoning
Trust
Skeptical evaluation
Diversity
Three ways how science protects against flaws in reasoning
Individual norms
Social norms
methods of science
theoretical claims
Claims made about entities, properties or occurrences that are not directly observable.
Hypothesis
a conjectural statement based on limited data - a guess about what the world is like
expectations
Are conjectural claims about observable phenomena based on some hypothesis
Expectations do not regard just any potential observations…
but observations that scientists anticipate being able to make
We could say what we would expect to experience if we were in the middle of a black hole (given some hypothesis about black holes), but since we don’t expect to ever be making observations from inside a black hole, those expectations are useless.
Observations include
Any information gained from the senses
Data
Are public records produced by observation or by some measuring device
superb-observational
access to what would otherwise be undetecable to use, given our sensory modalities
E,g, fMRI machine to show brain activity
