The concepts of objectivity, truth, and the authority of empirical standards have comeunder serious challenge by some critics of the social sciences in the past several decades. Feminist critics charge that the concepts and methods of the social sciences reflect an essentialpatriarchalism that discredits the objectivity of social science knowledge. Marxist criticssometimes contend t...

* Senior Consultant Physician Division of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics Department of Medicine National University Hospital Address for Reprints: Professor Vernon M S Oh, Division of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Department of Medicine, National University Hospital, Singapore119074. E-mail: [email protected] As with clinical practice, the practice of biomedical research i...

We propose that people may gain certain "offensive" and "defensive" advantages for their cherished belief systems (e.g., religious and political views) by including aspects of unfalsifiability in those belief systems, such that some aspects of the beliefs cannot be tested empirically and conclusively refuted. This may seem peculiar, irrational, or at least undesirable to many people because it ...

The problem of devising a theory for paranormal phenomena (psi) may be separated into, first, the basic physical mechanism and second, the psychological aspects of how and when people are able to elicit psi. Observational theory addresses primarily the first aspect, the basic physical mechanism of psi. A problem is that the known types of physical interaction do not fit the existing data. The m...

“The game of red and blue” is an example given by Gillies (2000) to illustrate the superiority of his propensity interpretation of probability over the subjective interpretation of de Finetti. I will show that the falsifiability of probability models by means of statistical tests, which is crucial for Gillies’ interpretation, is subject to serious difficulties, one of which is the goodnessof-fi...

16 In 1922, JBS Haldane discovered an intriguing bias of postzygotic isolation 17 during early speciation: the heterogametic sex of F1 hybrids between closely related 18 species or subspecies is more susceptible to sterility or inviability than the homogametic 19 sex. This phenomenon, now known as Haldane’s rule, has been repeatedly confirmed 20 across broad taxa in diecious animals and plants....

Cognitive architectures—task-general theories of the structure and function of the complete cognitive system—are sometimes argued to be more akin to frameworks or belief systems than scientific theories. The argument stems from the apparent non-falsifiability of existing cognitive architectures. Newell (1990) was aware of this criticism and argued that architectures should be viewed not as theo...

The psychology of religion has existed as a neglected subdiscipline in general psychology, but a trend toward integration is currently present, partly due to applications of well-corroborated theories from mainstream psychology. The article has two aims. First, the most influential psychodynamic “depth” approaches (those of Erikson, 1958, 1959, 1963; Freud, 1913/1919, 1927/1964a, 1939/1964b; Jo...

[1] Many Earth science disciplines are currently experiencing the emergence of new ways of data publication and the establishment of an information technology infrastructure for data archiving and exchange. Building on efforts to standardize data and metadata publication in geochemistry [Staudigel et al., 2002], here we discuss options for data publication, archiving and exchange. All of these ...

Evolutionary psychology has emerged over the past 15 years as a major theoretical perspective, generating an increasing volume of empirical studies and assuming a larger presence within psychological science. At the same time, it has generated critiques and remains controversial among some psychologists. Some of the controversy stems from hypotheses that go against traditional psychological the...