Scientific Understanding, Fictional Understanding, and Scientific Progress

Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding.

What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scie...

Exploring and Understanding citation-Based Scientific Metrics

This paper explores citation-based metrics, how they differ in ranking papers and authors, and why. We initially take as example three main metrics that we believe significant; the standard citation count, the more and more popular h-index, and a variation we propose of PageRank applied to papers (called PaperRank), that is appealing as it mirrors proven and successful algorithms for ranking we...

Laboratory Astrophysics: Enabling Scientific Discovery and Understanding

Laboratory Astrophysics: Enabling Scientific Discovery and Understanding Kate Kirby∗ ∗Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Truth, Scientific Understanding and Haugeland’s Existential Ontology

Clinical and scientific understanding of fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a common chronic pain condition with worldwide prevalence of 2-4%. It is characterised by chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, sleeping disturbances and cognitive dysfunction. It remains a contested illness with some physicians who consider it as a functional somatic disease rather than a “real” specific disease. The ACR diagnostic criteria have provided a powerful ...