Notes on the Inexact Sciences

Authors

• Suspended Reason

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Abstract

• Popular wisdom warns us against premature optimization. And yet, in a quest for public legitimacy and tidy problem domains, many fields discourage vitally necessary descriptive and conceptual work in favor of statistical analysis and laboratory experiments. Topics of unprecedented complexity are tackled using rote, mechanical approaches, by researchers who routinely fail to realize how much linguistic and conceptual clarification is a precondition of headway. Meanwhile, sociological and professional incentives prevent the sorts of synthetic work that might de-provincialize researchers' theories, and initiate exactly those conceptual refactorings which would advance the discipline.

Date

• Nov, 2022

Author Biography

• Suspended Reason's work can be found at https://suspendedreason.github.io/
  

Citation

• Suspended Reason (2022). Notes on the Inexact Sciences. Seeds of Science. https://doi.org/10.53975/u60q-i1jd

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Area(s)

• Metascience, Psychology, Social Science