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Some scholars claim that epistemology of science and machine learning are actually overlapping disciplines studying induction, respectively affected by Hume's problem of induction and its formal machine‐learning counterpart, the "no‐free‐lunch" (NFL) theorems, to which even advanced AI systems such as LLMs are not immune. Extending Kevin Korb's view, this paper envisions a hierarchy of disciplines where the lowermost is a basic science, and, recursively, the metascience at each level inductively learns which methods work best at the immediately lower level. Due to Hume's dictum and NFL theorems, no exact metanorms for the good performance of each object science can be obtained after just a finite number of levels up the hierarchy, and the progressive abstractness of each metadiscipline and consequent ill‐definability of its methods and objects makes science—as defined by a minimal standard of scientificity—cease to exist above a certain metalevel, allowing for a still rational style of inquiry into science that can be called "philosophical." Philosophical levels, transitively reflecting on science, peculiarly manifest a non–empirically learned urge to self‐reflection constituting the properly normative aspect of philosophy of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The purpose of this essay was to critically discuss whether there are and what are the epistemological differences between scientists and designers. These two characters are worked out in the form of extreme stereotypes. The scientist is the ultimate representative of a traditional and positivist view of science, which seeks to explain in a value-free way how the world is. While the designer represents all those who act guided by proposals of value to transform the world, not just explain it. In these two different ways of acting and creating knowledge, Peirce's three types of logical inference would play a fundamental role, induction and deduction being the central tools for the scientist and abduction of the designer's own thinking. Throughout the work, we present a critique about this split, demonstrating that this is an artificial and inadequate division, since both characters work with the three types of inference. In this way, both would be, contrary to what the literature defends, epistemologically very similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on Carey and Smith’s work on epistemology of science, this study characterized elementary students’ scientific epistemology from the role-of-idea and theory-building perspective. The participants included 102 elementary students in Hong Kong. Open-ended questions and coding schemes were developed to examine and characterize their epistemic understanding of science. Four key dimensions were identified: role of idea, theory-fact understanding, theory revision and creation, and social process of scientific progress. The general pattern showed that students’ views of scientific inquiry ranged from seeing it as a mechanical process involving concrete materials and sets of scientific skills, to viewing it as an idea-driven process comprising collective theory-building and knowledge creation. The analysis showed that these students generally had a limited understanding of the role-of-idea and theory-building in science. Quantitative analysis indicated that this conceptualized epistemology of science was an important predictor of students’ academic performance in science. Implications for science education and future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the extent to which the availability of unprecedentedly rich data-sets and the need for new approaches – both epistemological and computational – is an emerging issue for Macroeconomics. By adopting an evolutionary approach, we describe the paradigm shifts experienced in the macroeconomic research field and emphasize that the types of data the macroeconomist has to deal with play an important role in the evolutionary process of the development of the discipline. After introducing the current debate over Big Data in social sciences, the paper presents a detailed discussion of possible and existing interactions between Big Data and Computational Behavioral Macroeconomics. We argue that Big Data applied to economic questions can lead to new styles of thinking and research methods, namely to the development of a new research paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study deals with the school instruction of the concept of weight. The historical review reveals the major steps in changing weight definition reflecting the epistemological changes in physics. The latest change drawing on the operation of weighing has been not widely copied into physics education. We compared the older instruction based on the gravitational definition of weight with the newer one based on the operational definition. The experimental teaching was applied in two versions, simpler and extended. The study examined the impact of this instruction on the middle school students in regular teaching environment. The experiment involved three groups ( N = 486) of 14-year-old students (ninth grade). The assessment drew on a written questionnaire and personal interviews. The elicited schemes of conceptual knowledge allowed to evaluate the impact on students' pertinent knowledge. The advantage of the new teaching manifested itself in the significant decrease of the well-known misconceptions such as 'space causes weightlessness,' 'weight is an unchanged property of the body considered,' and 'heavier objects fall faster'. The twofold advantage-epistemological and conceptual-of the operational definition of weight supports the correspondent curricular changes of its adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies a new quantitative methodological approach to diagnose epistemology conceptions in a large sample. The analyses use seven multiple-rating items on the epistemology of science drawn from the item pool Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS). The bases of the new methodological diagnostic approach are the empirical psychometric scaling of the item sentences in accordance with experts' criteria, the implementation of a multiple-rating model of answering (the respondent appraises each item sentence), and a scoring procedure that computes standardized indices from the multiple-rating responses and the sentence's scaling. These standardized indices represent the extent to which the respondent's conceptions about the epistemology of science are informed (the higher the index, the more informed the conception). The approach is applied to evaluate the conceptions of a large and diverse national sample through its standardized indices, which provide statistical hypothesis-testing across individual sentences, items, groups, or studies, computation of reliability indices, the correlations between items, and an exploratory factor analysis that may complement qualitative analysis. Finally, the most relevant features of the new approach, its potential for applications to teacher training and curricular development in the science classroom and the method's power to make easy, quick, and economic evaluations of conceptions about the nature of science, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can science properly serve as the exclusive or framing epistemology for conservation? It is argued here that, regardless of the ontological findings of science, its epistemology subtly reinforces anthropocentric bias by distancing the knower from the known in the name of value neutrality. If conservation is to escape the grip of anthropocentric bias, its underlying epistemology needs to be expanded to include very different ways of knowing, based on feeling and hence on caring, that may be found in certain Indigenous cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista Organizações em Contexto is the property of Revista Organizacoes em Contexto and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents a study on adapting Turkish culture, language validity and examination of factor structure of scientific epistemological beliefs. The researchers conducted investigations based on the level of importance of the subject in Turkish culture. It found that Turkish form of Scale of Scientific Epistemological Beliefs can be evaluated as an assessment instrument.

In his article Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord, David Long (2010) rightly challenges our presumptions of what science is and brings forth some of the disjunctures between science and deeply held American religious beliefs. Reading his narrative of the conflicts that he experienced on the opening day of the Creation Museum, I cannot help but reconsider what the epistemology of science is and science learning ought to be. Rather than science being taught as a prescribed, deterministic system of beliefs and procedures as it is often done, I suggest instead that it would be more appropriate to teach science as a way of thinking and making sense of dialectical processes in nature. Not as set of ultimate ''truths'', but as understandings of processes themselves in the process of simultaneously becoming and being transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We begin by drawing upon the available literature to identify four characteristics of teacher talk likely to support student learning about the epistemology of science: making appropriate statements about the epistemology of science in the classroom, linking the epistemology of science with specific science concepts, stating and justifying learning aims, and working with students’ ideas. These characteristics are then used in an analysis of the classroom talk of seven teachers as they use published resources for teaching about the epistemology of science for the first time. By focusing on teachers’ initial classroom experiences of using these published resources we identify feasible starting points for professional development activities likely to support these teachers in developing their expertise in this challenging area of teaching. Lessons focused on a specific aspect of the epistemology of science (the development of theoretical models) contextualised within two content areas: electromagnetism and cell membrane structure. Our analysis shows that none of these teachers made clearly inappropriate statements about the epistemology of science in the classroom. However, expertise related to the remaining three characteristics of teacher talk varied between teachers. For example, some teachers used a range of approaches to working with students’ ideas during whole class talk (e.g. asking students to justify their ideas and challenging students’ views) whereas for other teachers students’ ideas were not a strong feature of classroom discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]