Processes rather than descriptions?

As a reply to the commentary (Humphreys in Found Sci, 2012), we explore the methodological implications of seeing artificial neural networks as generic classification tools, we show in which sense the use of descriptions and models in data analysis is not equivalent to the original empirical use of epicycles in describing planetary motion, and we argue that agnostic science is essentially related to the type of problems we ask about a phenomenon and to the processes used to find answers. Keywords Philosophy of science * Neural networks * Computational methods data analysis
The thoughtful and sympathetic commentary (Humphreys 2012) was a welcome opportunity to better define concepts we discussed in our paper (Napoletani et al. 2011), and to introduce some new concepts [...]