I agree that some notion of past fruitfulness and further promise is important. It’s however hard to judge fruitfulness from the outside as a lot of the progress within a new paradigm might not be intelligible in the old paradigms.
If you would have asked chiropractors in the 20th century whether they made theoretical progress, I would guess that you would get answer about how their theory progressed. If you however asked any mainstream medicine academic you would likely get the answer that they didn’t produce anything useful.
The standard peer review is a heavily standardized process that makes specific assumptions about the shape of knowledge.
The ontology of special relations is something that matters for science but I can have that discussion Github. Github does provide for a way of “peer-review” but it’s very different then the way traditional scientific papers work.
When I look at that discussion, it’s also funny that both the person I’m speaking with and I have both studied bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics as a field managed to share a lot of knowledge openly through ways besides scientific papers. It wouldn’t be surprising to me when the DSM gets one day replaced by a well developed ontology created with a more bioinformatical paradigm.
The database that comes out of the money from Zuckerberg will also be likely more scientifically valuable then any classical academic papers written about it.
Te problem of disagreements that arise due to different paradigms or ‘schools of thought’, which you mention, is an important problem as it concerns the possibility of so-called rational disagreements in science. This paper (published here) makes an attempt at providing a normative framework for such situations, suggesting that if scientists have at least some indications that the claims of their opponent is a result of a rational deliberation, they should epistemically tolerate their ideas, which means: they should treat them as potentially rational, their theory as potentially promising, and as a potential challenge to their own stance.
Of course, the main challenge for epistemic toleration is putting ourselves in the other one’s shoes :) Like in the example you mention: if the others are working on an approach that is completely different from mine, it won’t be easy for me to agree with everything they say, but that doesn’t mean I should equate them with some junk scientists.
As for discussions via Github, that’s interesting and probably we could discuss this in a separate thread, on the topic of different forms of scientific interaction. I think that peer-review can also be a useful form of dialogue, specially since a paper may end up going through different rounds of peer-review (sometimes also across different journals, in case it gets rejected in the beginning). However, preprint archives that we have nowadays are also valuable, since even if a paper keeps on being rejected (let’s say unfairly, e.g. due to a dogmatic environment in the given discipline), others may still have access to it, cite it, and it may still have an impact.
I agree that some notion of past fruitfulness and further promise is important. It’s however hard to judge fruitfulness from the outside as a lot of the progress within a new paradigm might not be intelligible in the old paradigms.
If you would have asked chiropractors in the 20th century whether they made theoretical progress, I would guess that you would get answer about how their theory progressed. If you however asked any mainstream medicine academic you would likely get the answer that they didn’t produce anything useful.
The standard peer review is a heavily standardized process that makes specific assumptions about the shape of knowledge.
The ontology of special relations is something that matters for science but I can have that discussion Github. Github does provide for a way of “peer-review” but it’s very different then the way traditional scientific papers work.
When I look at that discussion, it’s also funny that both the person I’m speaking with and I have both studied bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics as a field managed to share a lot of knowledge openly through ways besides scientific papers. It wouldn’t be surprising to me when the DSM gets one day replaced by a well developed ontology created with a more bioinformatical paradigm.
The database that comes out of the money from Zuckerberg will also be likely more scientifically valuable then any classical academic papers written about it.
Te problem of disagreements that arise due to different paradigms or ‘schools of thought’, which you mention, is an important problem as it concerns the possibility of so-called rational disagreements in science. This paper (published here) makes an attempt at providing a normative framework for such situations, suggesting that if scientists have at least some indications that the claims of their opponent is a result of a rational deliberation, they should epistemically tolerate their ideas, which means: they should treat them as potentially rational, their theory as potentially promising, and as a potential challenge to their own stance.
Of course, the main challenge for epistemic toleration is putting ourselves in the other one’s shoes :) Like in the example you mention: if the others are working on an approach that is completely different from mine, it won’t be easy for me to agree with everything they say, but that doesn’t mean I should equate them with some junk scientists.
As for discussions via Github, that’s interesting and probably we could discuss this in a separate thread, on the topic of different forms of scientific interaction. I think that peer-review can also be a useful form of dialogue, specially since a paper may end up going through different rounds of peer-review (sometimes also across different journals, in case it gets rejected in the beginning). However, preprint archives that we have nowadays are also valuable, since even if a paper keeps on being rejected (let’s say unfairly, e.g. due to a dogmatic environment in the given discipline), others may still have access to it, cite it, and it may still have an impact.