By the end of the first part of this series I listed the most important norms included in what Ian Jarvie calls Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’. Now I will start discussing several important problems of this Popperian rules. One first problem we can identify is whether Popper proposes these norms as just a suggestion […]
In spite of the title of his most important book ( The Logic of Scientific Discovery -LSD-, published originally in German as The Logik der Forschung , in 1935), Karl Popper’s fundamental claim about the rules of science is that they are not a matter of logic , in the sense that they cannot be […]
As I mentioned in passing in my last entry , many, if not most, of the oldest stories about Christian martyrs and saints are nothing but legendary fabrications, something that scholars knew perfectly well since at least the time of the Enlightenment, when scientific criteria of historiographic research started to be employed by ecclesiastical historians […]
One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, was already considerably ‘destroyed’ by the time Christianism became the official, and soon the only […]
The progress that physics experienced during the 20 th century was probably one of the greatest and most everlasting successes of the humankind. Discovering the hidden and minute composition of matter and energy, as well as realising that the rules they obey are as further from common sense as quantum theory has revealed, are amongst […]
In our previous entries , we asked why it is that collaborating scientists prefer to publish one single paper in which all their contributions are ‘mixed’, instead of one individual paper by each co-author (with quotations to the other collaborator’s paper where necessary). There is a relatively obvious (but, as I shall show, partial) answer […]
Let me leave aside for a moment our talk about scientists and papers, and bring up a topic that, at first sight, might seem totally unconnected: Ronald Coase’s economic theory about the firm and the allocation of property rights. As in the case of the problem we mentioned in our last entry (why scientists share […]
The allocation of merit to individual scientists is one of the crucial aspects of how scientific systems work. Publication of ‘papers’ in important journals, and, still most significantly, citation of those papers in the works of colleagues, is perhaps (with all its shortcomings ) the most determinant mechanism for recognising the value and capacity of […]
In the two previous entries (1, 2) of this series I described the different diagnoses that Marina Garcés and Steven Pinker make of humanity’s current predicament, without concealing my sympathies for the latter’s: with up and downs, with unequal division of the benefits, without bringing us a literal paradise, with lots of problems still to […]
Are we in the best of the times, as Steven Pinker asserts? Or do we live in a ‘posthumous’ society, to say it with the favourite image of Marina Garcés? As I told in the previous entry, it is not easy to make a direct comparison between the ideas of both authors, because they follow […]