Three Kinds of Niche Construction

Three Levels of Semiosis: Three Kinds of Kinds

In philosophy, there is an as yet unresolved discussion on whether there are different kinds of kinds and what those kinds are. In particular, there is a distinction between indifferent kinds, which are unaffected by observation and representation, and interactive kinds, which respond to being studied in ways that alter the very kinds under study. This is in essence a discussion on ontologies a...

Three kinds of ethics for three kinds of engineering

Niche Construction

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Three kinds of lies.

Everyone is familiar with the famous quote from Benjamin Disraeli about lies and statistics, but we depend on statistics to evaluate the claims made by most articles published in the ophthalmic literature. The article in this issue by Lisboa et al (See page 1317) found that only 21% of the publications in 3 major ophthalmology journals in 2012 used simple descriptive statistics (percentages, me...

Three Kinds of Idealization

Philosophers of science increasingly recognize the importance of idealization, the intentional introduction of approximate or false information into scientific theories. The literature of the past twenty years contains a number of accounts of idealization which provide differing characterizations of this practice and differing justifications for it. There is thus little consensus on some of the...