Model-Centrism 2: Data Density

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Climate Change, Global warming, Logic, Philosophy of Science

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97%, Climate change Denial, Logic, philosophy of science

Within the limits of my own study, the idea of “data density” and its relation to science vs. pseudo-science, is not one that I recall having encountered. (And I freely admit that my studies are limited; the world is large, and human life is short.) I suspect that no small part of the problem is that we have only begun to slam into this wall in earnest in the last few generations. I wish to use this idea of “data density” here to compare two branches of scientific study. It is my thesis that the data in gravitational cosmology is especially “thin” and “patchy,” which makes the general lack of attention to alternative models to the standard one especially inexcusable.

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Model-Centrism 1: A Scientific Controversy

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, model-centrism, Philosophy of Science

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Logic, model-centrism, philosophy of science

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.

– Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

There are scientific disciplines out there that are in a state of fundamental crisis. But unless you’ve a moderate degree of expertise in those fields, it is unlikely you know about such crises. I want to examine one such crisis here, and touch on its relation to a way of approaching the world that I’ve taken to calling “model-centrism.”

The Holmesian dicta quoted above is hideously simplistic (one must already have significant theoretical commitments in play before any evidence can make its appearance AS evidence. To decline to theorize entirely would not make one open to the facts and evidence, it would make one completely incapable of recognizing anything as a fact or as evidence.) Nevertheless, it touches upon an important issue with model-centrism, and model-centric thinking, namely the impatience for gathering data that leads some people to favor abstract theories without any regard for how such theories might be tested or validated.