2. Alternative Views of the Scientific Method and of Modeling

Chapter

Requires Authentication

2. Alternative Views of the Scientific Method and of Modeling

or

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00

Published by

View more publications by Princeton University Press

To Publisher Page

This chapter is in the book The Ecological Detective

CHAPTER TWO Alternative Views of the Scientific Method and of Modeling Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations (Feynman 1965, 1985). Because our de-scriptions of the world are almost always incomplete and our measurements involve uncertainty. and inaccuracy, we require methods for assessing the concordance of the com-peting ideas and the observations. These methods generally constitute the field of statistics (Stigler 1986). Our purpose in writing this book is to provide ecologists with additional tools to make this process more efficient. Most of the mate-rial provided in subsequent chapters deals with formal tools for evaluating the confrontation between ideas and data, but before we delve into the methods we step back and con-sider the scientific process itself. No scientist can be truly "neutral." We all operate within a fundamental philosophi-cal worldview, and the types of statistical tools we employ and the types of experiments we do depend on that philoso-phy. Here we present four such philosophies. There is a commonly accepted model for the scientific process (and from it arose a well-developed body of statistics that is taught in nearly every university in North America). The basic view can be thought of as a learning tree of criti-cal experiments, which was described by Platt (1964) as "strong inference," and consists of the following steps: 1. Devising alternative hypotheses 2. Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them) with 12

You are currently not able to access this content.

Not sure if you should have access? Please log in using an institutional account to see if you have access to view or download this content.

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00

CHAPTER TWO Alternative Views of the Scientific Method and of Modeling Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations (Feynman 1965, 1985). Because our de-scriptions of the world are almost always incomplete and our measurements involve uncertainty. and inaccuracy, we require methods for assessing the concordance of the com-peting ideas and the observations. These methods generally constitute the field of statistics (Stigler 1986). Our purpose in writing this book is to provide ecologists with additional tools to make this process more efficient. Most of the mate-rial provided in subsequent chapters deals with formal tools for evaluating the confrontation between ideas and data, but before we delve into the methods we step back and con-sider the scientific process itself. No scientist can be truly "neutral." We all operate within a fundamental philosophi-cal worldview, and the types of statistical tools we employ and the types of experiments we do depend on that philoso-phy. Here we present four such philosophies. There is a commonly accepted model for the scientific process (and from it arose a well-developed body of statistics that is taught in nearly every university in North America). The basic view can be thought of as a learning tree of criti-cal experiments, which was described by Platt (1964) as "strong inference," and consists of the following steps: 1. Devising alternative hypotheses 2. Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them) with 12

You are currently not able to access this content.

Not sure if you should have access? Please log in using an institutional account to see if you have access to view or download this content.

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00