In federal courts, the admissibility of scientific expert testimony in the last century has been governed by three major standards. The first of these standards, the "general acceptance" test, arose from the 1923 Frye v. United States (Frye) and required that any technique or method introduced in court be generally accepted by the relevant community of scientists. The more liberal "relevancy" s...

It has been fashionable to regard science as an ‘unending quest’, which involves the formulation of a hypothesis, its submission to empirical testing and, if ‘falsified’, its replacement with a new one and repetition of the procedure [1]. This doctrine of the “logic of scientific discovery”, denying any role of induction, was established by the philosopher Karl Popper. Although it has been larg...

We investigate a particular type of curvaton mechanism, under which inflation can occur at Hubble scale of order 1 TeV. The curvaton is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson, whose order parameter increases after a phase transition during inflation, triggered by the gradual decrease of the Hubble scale. The mechanism is studied in the context of modular inflation, where the inflaton is a string axion....

Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic representation. But we don’t think that the existing results provide strong support for Branigan & Pickering’s (B&P’s) model, largely because the priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools available, and linguists are increasingly...

This study investigates student conceptions of the facial angle as a way to attain understanding elements of the theory of human evolution. The chosen laboratory work involved determining the species of a human cranium, and students had to design and write down their own experimental procedure. Three versions of the laboratory work were carried out leading to different student productions. Thre...

Functionalist phonetic literature has shown how the phonologies of human languages are arranged to facilitate ease of articulation and perception. The explanatory force of phonological theory is greatly increased if it can directly access these research results. There are two formal mechanisms that together can facilitate the link-up of formal to functional work. As others have noted, Optimalit...

Functionalist phonetic literature has shown how the phonologies of human languages are arranged to facilitate ease of articulation and perception. The explanatory force of phonological theory is greatly increased if it can directly access these research results. There are two formal mechanisms that together can facilitate the link-up of formal to functional work. As others have noted, Optimalit...

The aim of social scientists is to capture the causal mechanisms that explain behavior of people and groups of people, such as communities, societies or firms. Such an endeavor becomes increasingly difficult as theorizing concerns patterns of behavior. A theory of behavior explains how the cause-effect structure of interaction among specific variables leads to emergent paths of behavior of thes...

Conspiracy theory has lately come under greater scrutiny in countries around the world, with several conspiracy theories having gained infamy for encouraging dangerous behaviors and attitudes among their followers: QAnon United States (see Coaston, 2020); claims that COVID-19 was brought to China by Americans Chunshan, broader international anti-vaccination movement DiRusso & Stansberry, 2022; ...

This paper reports on a concerted effort to axiomatize social science theories in first order logic. Most social science theories are stated in ordinary language (like essay-style articles in social science journals). The natural language argumentation is usually sketchy and incomplete, relying on the reader’s common-sense or on familiarity with common background assumptions in the substantive ...