On 10 Apr 2000 14:06:32 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (dennis roberts)
wrote:
> here are a few (fastly found i admit) urls about scientific method ... some
> are quite interesting
< snip; so that no one might think that I recommend the citations >
I saved this note because it had references, but I was disappointed by
them, now that I finally got around to checking -- after the first
three, I quit checking.
The first one had the tone such that I wondered if the author was
going to point me to Biblical Creationism as what he *recommended* .
Well, it is not the perspective you will see in your Social Science
textbooks.
I recommend, instead, that if you want to understand how a scientist's
mind works, you might want to read a critique of that neurotic U.S.
movement -- Try Stephen Jay Gould, when he is writing essays and book
reviews (rather than the excellent Naturalist topics, which make up
most of his books). I think "Urchins in the storm" is a book of
reviews. He also wrote an excellent piece about the role of biasses
in social science history, "The Mismeasure of Man".
For deep consideration of the scientific method, I recommend,
"Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge" (Lakatos, ed.). This book
happens to be from the proceedings of a symposium devoted to exploring
Thomas Kuhn's thesis about revolutions in scientific discovery, and it
is a modern classic.
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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