Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

What does a RCT tell us? Parachute use compared with a backpack control did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when used by participants jumping from aircraft in this first randomized evaluation of the intervention. This largely resulted from our ability to only recruit participants jumping from stationary aircraft on the ground. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials evaluating their...

Why there is no relationship between truth and logic .[embedded content] To be ‘analytical’ and ‘logical’ is something most people find recommendable. These words have a positive connotation. Scientists think deeper than most other people because they use ‘logical’ and ‘analytical’ methods. In dictionaries, logic is often defined as “reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity” and ‘analysis’ as having to do with “breaking...

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Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophie — der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen .[embedded content]

David Graeber on the importance of Roy Bhaskar’s work .[embedded content] No philosopher of science has influenced yours truly’s thinking more than Roy Bhaskar did. Roy always emphasised that the world itself should never be conflated with the knowledge we have of it. Science can only produce meaningful, relevant and realist knowledge if it acknowledges its dependence of the​ world out there. Ultimately that also means that the critique yours truly wages...

On the limits of formal methods in causal inference Our problem is … with the temptation to think that by stating some of our assumptions more clearly, we have successfully formalized the entire inferential process … Science may indeed seek objectivity, and for this reason a deductive method for causal inference is indeed highly desirable. But this does not mean that it is possible: we cannot have one just because we decide we need one. Causal conclusions...

Moving beyond induction and deduction .[embedded content] In a time when scientific relativism is expanding, it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level. We have to maintain the Enlightenment tradition in which the main task of science is studying the structure of reality. Science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them. There...

The man who stopped smoking and saved millions of lives .[embedded content]

Do RCTs really carry special epistemic weight? Mike Clarke, the Director of the Cochrane Centre in the UK, for example, states on the Centre’s Web site: ‘In a randomized trial, the only difference between the two groups being compared is that of most interest: the intervention under investigation’. This seems clearly to constitute a categorical assertion that by randomizing, all other factors — both known and unknown — are equalized between the experimental...