In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It also examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience and other products of human activity, like art and literature and beliefs. The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be termed "scientific" in topics such as education and public policy.
An early attempt at demarcation can be seen in the efforts of Greek natural philosophers and medical practitioners to distinguish their methods and their accounts of nature from the mythological or mystical accounts of their predecessors and contemporaries.
Aristotle described at length what was involved in having scientific knowledge of something. To be scientific, he said, one must deal with causes, one must use logical demonstration, and one must identify the universals which 'inhere' in the particulars of sense. But above all, to have science one must have apodictic certainty. It is the last feature which, for Aristotle, most clearly distinguished the scientific way of knowing.
G. E. R. Lloyd noted that there was a sense in which the groups engaged in various forms of inquiry into nature attempt to "legitimate their own positions", laying "claim to a new kind of wisdom ... that purported to yield superior enlightenment, even superior practical effectiveness". Medical writers of the Hippocratic tradition maintained that their discussions were based on demonstration of logical necessity, a theme developed by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. One element of this polemic for science was an insistence on a clear and unequivocal presentation of arguments, rejecting the imagery, analogy, and myth of the old wisdom. Some of their claimed naturalistic explanations of phenomena have been found to be quite fanciful, with little reliance on actual observations.
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Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable (i.e. confirmed through the senses) or a truth of logic (e.g., tautologies). Verificationism rejects statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics, and aesthetics, as cognitively meaningless. Such statements may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behavior, but not in terms of conveying truth value, information, or factual content.
A non-science is an area of study that is not scientific, especially one that is not a natural science or a social science that is an object of scientific inquiry. In this model, history, art, and religion are all examples of non-sciences. Demarcation problem Since the 17th century, some writers have used the word science to exclude some areas of studies, such as the arts and the liberal arts. The word nonscience, to describe non-scientific academic disciplines, was first used in the middle of the 19th century.
Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process (the scientific method), some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.
When moving from known-input security to chosen-input security, some generic attacks sometimes become possible and must be discarded by a specific set of rules in the threat model. Similarly, common practices consist of fixing security systems, once an exp ...
Springer Berlin Heidelberg2016
The circular economy concept, as presented by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), together with many other organisations, could be threatened by opportunists and fantasists. In essence, anyone with an aversion to seek to scientifically clarify the presen ...
We present a comparative study on sentence boundary prediction for German and English broadcast news that explores generalization across different languages. In the feature extraction stage, word pause duration is firstly extracted from word aligned speech ...