You start with the assumption that academia works by ensuring that there are no errors in papers. This sounds like the Popperian hypothesis that falsification is what drives science forward. Historians of science like Thomas Khun seem to constistently find that science doesn’t work the way Popper assumes it does.
Given how diseased the field of Neuroscience is it might be a easy target, but apart from their ability to consistently get results that are better then possible, they also managed as a community to make a certain statistical error in 50% of the papers where such an error could be made.
At the same time, the field seems to make progress. It provides demand for fMRI to be build and as a result fMRIs with higher resolution get as time goes on. There are now even designs for MEG scanners that don’t need to be supercooled.
You start with the assumption that academia works by ensuring that there are no errors in papers.
I think you misunderstood the question. The assumption of the post is explicitly that we expect that there will be errors in papers, and we are just asking how the errors in those papers are being discovered, and how those discoveries are communicated.
The question is: Given that a lot of ideas will be wrong and confused, how does academia notice and communicate those confusions?
Oli’s comment is right. Another way of phrasing the question is:
Why do journals purport to contain no errors in any of the papers? Is it because they’re lying about the quality of the papers? Or if there’s a reliable process that removed errors from 100% of papers, can someone tell me what that process was?
You’re right that I misspoke to imply they explicitly claim no errors, I shall correct that in the OP.
However, if I knew a community where nobody ever disagreed with anyone else nor admitted error of their own, I would think this odd. Especially if they purported to be doing science.
You start with the assumption that academia works by ensuring that there are no errors in papers. This sounds like the Popperian hypothesis that falsification is what drives science forward. Historians of science like Thomas Khun seem to constistently find that science doesn’t work the way Popper assumes it does.
Given how diseased the field of Neuroscience is it might be a easy target, but apart from their ability to consistently get results that are better then possible, they also managed as a community to make a certain statistical error in 50% of the papers where such an error could be made.
At the same time, the field seems to make progress. It provides demand for fMRI to be build and as a result fMRIs with higher resolution get as time goes on. There are now even designs for MEG scanners that don’t need to be supercooled.
I think you misunderstood the question. The assumption of the post is explicitly that we expect that there will be errors in papers, and we are just asking how the errors in those papers are being discovered, and how those discoveries are communicated.
The question is: Given that a lot of ideas will be wrong and confused, how does academia notice and communicate those confusions?
Oli’s comment is right. Another way of phrasing the question is:
Edit: I’ve added this to the OP.
Do they actually so purport? Do you just mean that they don’t say, “I am full of errors!”?
This reads to me like the journals are claiming inerrancy, which I don’t think they do. Maybe you meant something else though?
You’re right that I misspoke to imply they explicitly claim no errors, I shall correct that in the OP.
However, if I knew a community where nobody ever disagreed with anyone else nor admitted error of their own, I would think this odd. Especially if they purported to be doing science.