Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, says Ioannidis, with ensuing confusion and disappointment.

This book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates philosophical and social influences reshaping the concept and, at the core of this reshaping, identifies a fundamental problem: the issue of whether psychological attributes really are quantitative. It argues that the idea of measurement now endorsed within psychology actually subverts attempts to establish a genuinely quantitative science and it urges a new direction. It relates views (...) on measurement by thinkers such as Holder, Russell, Campbell and Nagel to earlier views, like those of Euclid and Oresme. Within the history of psychology, it considers contributions by Fechner, Cattell, Thorndike, Stevens and Suppes, among others. It also contains a non-technical exposition of conjoint measurement theory and recent foundational work by leading measurement theorist R. Duncan Luce. (shrink)

What Chow calls NHSTP is an inconsistent hybrid of Fisherian and Neyman-Pearsonian ideas. In psychology it has been practiced like ritualistic handwashing and sustained by wishful thinking about its utility. Chow argues that NHSTP is an important tool for ruling out chance as an explanation for data. I disagree. This ritual discourages theory development by providing researchers with no incentive to specify hypotheses.

Few can imagine a world without telephones or televisions; many depend on computers and the Internet as part of daily life. Without scientific theory, these developments would not have been possible. In this exceptionally clear and engaging introduction to philosophy of science, James Ladyman explores the philosophical questions that arise when we reflect on the nature of the scientific method and the knowledge it produces. He discusses whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science, and (...) considers in detail the debate between realists and antirealists about the extent of scientific knowledge. Along the way, central topics in philosophy of science, such as the demarcation of science from non-science, induction, confirmation and falsification, the relationship between theory and observation and relativism are all addressed. Important and complex current debates over underdetermination, inference to the best explaination and the implications of radical theory change are clarified and clearly explained for those new to the subject. (shrink)

Platt's 1964 paper "Strong Inference" (SI), published in Science, has had considerable influence upon the conception of the nature of the scientific method held in both the social and physical sciences. Platt suggests that a four-step method of specifying hypotheses and conducting critical experiments that systematically eliminate alternatives has been responsible for progress in the history of the successful sciences and, if adopted, will allow the less successful sciences to make greater progress. This paper criticizes SI on a number of (...) grounds including: 1) no demonstration of the central historical claim, that is, that the more successful sciences actually have utilized this method more frequently than the less successful sciences; 2)poor historiography, in that more faithful explications of some of the historical case studies Platt cites as canonical examples of SI fail to support that SI was actually used in any of these cases; 3)failure to identify other cases of important scientific progress that did not use SI and instead used distinct scientific methods; 4)neglect of the importance and implications of background knowledge used in problem formulation; 5)the impossibility of enumerating a complete set of alternative hypotheses; 6)no acknowledgement of the Quine-Duhem thesis indicating that "critical" experiments are actually logically inconclusive; 7)the assumption that there is one scientific method; and 8)significant ambiguity regarding exactly how each of the four steps of SI is to be faithfully implemented. Some recommendations regarding a normative scientific method are given. (shrink)

This study aims to disentangle complexity from randomness and chaos, and to present a definition of complexity that emphasizes its epistemically distinct qualities. I will review existing attempts at defining complexity and argue that these suffer from two major faults: a tendency to neglect the underlying dynamics and to focus exclusively on the phenomenology of complex systems; and linguistic imprecisions in describing these phenomenologies. I will argue that the tendency to discuss phenomenology removed from the underlying dynamics is the main (...) root of the difficulties in distinguishing complex from chaotic or random systems. In my own definition, I will explicitly try to avoid these pitfalls. The theoretical contemplations in this paper will be tested on a sample of five models: the random Kac ring, the chaotic CA30, the regular CA90, the complex CA110 and the complex Bak-Sneppen model. Although these modelling studies are restricted in scope and can only be seen as preliminary, they still constitute on of the first attempts to investigate complex systems comparatively. (shrink)