On misunderstanding science

Abstract

The paper examines the differences between Kuhn's account, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, of the sciences as necessarily communal activities with internally set standards of procedure and achievement, and that view of the sciences which calls itself ‘Scientific Realism’ and regards them as striving toward, and perhaps asymptotically approaching, some external and objective reality that bestows truth or falsity on scientific theories.

The main argument turns on Poincaré's demonstration that Newton's Second Law (f = ma) is not a testable, provable proposition with a truth value, but something that is simply adopted. It is adopted in the light of experience, certainly, but there is no logical necessity in the adoption. My suggestion is that it is a ‘way of looking’ and ‘a method of analysis’ and that the necessity of its adoption by any individual lies in its being a necessary condition of entry into the scientific community. That community itself adopts ways of looking or methods of analysis for their fruitfulness in dealing with old problems and defining new ones.

Incoherences in the ‘approach’ account of scientific progress are looked at, and the individualistic assumptions that motivate it. These require the sciences to be presented as the source and basis of agreement and community amongst separated individuals. This picture and its requirement inverts reality as well as Kuhn's account, which makes community and agreement the starting point. The notion of reality as a transcendental convergence point becomes redundant.

The old problem of the incommensurability of paradigms is discussed by relating them to the notions of ways of looking and methods of analysis. These may be incompatible in that one cannot look at things in two different ways at once, but at the same time they cannot be measured on any common scale.     

Finding Creativity in an Artificial Artist

Creativity is an important component of human intelligence, and imbuing artificially intelligent systems with creativity is an interesting challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantify (or even qualify) creativity. Recently, it has been suggested that conditions for attributing creativity to a system include: appreciation, imagination, and skill. We demonstrate and describe an original computer system (called DARCI) that is designed to produce images through creative means. We present methods for evaluating DARCI and other artificially creative systems with respect to appreciation, imagination, and skill, and use these methods to show that DARCI is arguably a creative system.     

N400 and P600 or the Role of the ERP Correlates in Sentence Comprehension: Some Applications to the Italian Language

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were applied to the study of language comprehension in the Italian language. The ERPs were recorded from 10 electrodes while the participants read (Experiment 1) or listened (Experiment 2) to sentences containing semantic or syntactic anomalies. Final words that were inconsistent with the sentence context elicited a negative wave at about 400 ms poststimulus that was more concentrated in the posterior sites of the scalp, whereas final words that were incongruous with the grammatical structure (subject-verb nonagreement) elicited a positive wave at about 600 ms poststimulus that was homogeneously distributed on the scalp. The authors found no differences based on the perceptual modality of the stimulus (visual or auditory), nor did they find different ERP correlates as a function of task relevance (explicit-implicit task induction). The available evidence indicated that the ERP response to semantic anomalies was at least partially distinct from the ERP response to syntactic anomalies, and that a syntactic parser is a plausible process included in sentence comprehension. The two semantic and syntactic effects appear as automatic processes of the decoding of the anomalies and also modality-independent processes. Cross-linguistic applications are considered in the general discussion.     

Sampling Methods for Identifying Differences in Source Reliability

This study explored observer performance in using across-trial and within-trial variability information to weight sources based on reliability. Three trained observers performed a multi-element, visual signal-detection task under 3 block-type conditions: a fixed block condition and 2 random conditions. In the fixed block condition, the observers had both within- and across-trial variability information to identify differences in source reliability. The random conditions eliminated the across-trial information, leaving only within-trial variability information in 1 case and neither within- nor across-trial variability information in another case. There was a significant block-type effect. Observers could use differences in across-trial variability of individual sources to assign weights. Although there was a difference in the weights assigned to reliable and unreliable sources in the partial-random condition (in which within-trial variability information was available), only 1 participant showed a significant difference in the weight assignment relative to the full-random condition. Thus, altogether, observers were not very efficient at using within-trial variability to weight sources accordingly.     

Visual-Field Bias in the Judgment of Facial Expression of Emotion

The left and right hemispheres of the brain are differentially related to the processing of emotions. Although there is little doubt that the right hemisphere is relatively superior for processing negative emotions, controversy exists over the hemispheric role in the processing of positive emotions. Eighty right-handed normal male participants were examined for visual-field (left-right) differences in the perception of facial expressions of emotion. Facial composite (RR, LL) and hemifacial (R, L) sets depicting emotion expressions of happiness and sadness were prepared. Pairs of such photographs were presented bilaterally for 150 ms, and participants were asked to select the photographs that looked more expressive. A left visual-field superiority (a right-hemisphere function) was found for sad facial emotion. A hemispheric advantage in the perception of happy expression was not found.     

A Question of Foot Dominance

It is suggested that the popular definition of foot dominance (i.e., the limb preferred to execute a manipulative or mobilizing action while the other [nondominant] foot provides stabilizing support, e.g., kicking a ball) be reconsidered in light of understanding the functional characteristics of footedness and selected theoretical explanations. Relevance to future research designs and assessment methodology is discussed.     

Determinants of Offline Processing of Visual Information for the Control of Reaching Movements

The authors investigated the use of visual feedback as a form of knowledge of results (KR) for the control of rapid (200-250 ms) reaching movements in 40 participants. They compared endpoint accuracy and intraindividual variability of a full-vision group (FV) with those of no-vision groups provided with KR regarding (a) the endpoint in numerical form, (b) the endpoint in visual form, or (c) the endpoint and the trajectory in visual form (DEL). The FV group was more accurate and less variable than were the no-vision groups, and the analysis of limb trajectory variability indicated that their superior performance resulted primarily from better movement planning rather than from online visual processes. The FV group outperformed the DEL group even though both groups were obtaining the same amount of spatial visual information from every movement. That finding suggests that the effectiveness with which visual feedback is processed offline is not a simple function of the amount of visual information available, but depends on how that information is presented.     

Asymmetries in the Regulation of Visually Guided Aiming

An experiment was conducted to examine the contribution of sensory information to asymmetries in manual aiming. Movements were performed in four vision conditions. In the full-vision condition (FV), subjects were afforded vision of both the hand and the target throughout the course of the movement. In the ambient-illumination-off condition (AO), the room lights were extinguished at movement initiation, preventing vision of the moving limb. In the target-off (TO) condition, the target was extinguished upon initiation of the movement. In a no-vision (NV) condition, ambient illumination was removed and the target was extinguished upon initiation of the response movement. Results indicated that accuracy was superior in the full-vision and target-off conditions and when movements were made by the right hand. Movements made by the right hand were also of shorter mean duration. The magnitudes of performance asymmetries were uninfluenced by vision condition. Analyses of movement kinematics revealed that movements made in conditions in which there was vision of the limb exhibited a greater number of discrete modifications of the movement trajectory. On an individual-trial basis, no relationship existed between accuracy and the occurrence of discrete modifications. These data suggest that although vision greatly enhances accuracy, discrete modifications subserved by vision reflect the imposition of nonfunctional zero-order control processes upon continuous higher-order control regimes.     

Multivariate Relationships Between Motor and Personality Measures in Culturally Deprived High School Pupils

The relationship between personality, as measured by the IPAT-HSPQ, and certain motor performance variables was studied by utilizing the multivariate technique of canonical correlation. Ss for the study were 91 culturally deprived high school students who were achieving well below their expected capacity. A significant canonical relationship was not found between the domains of personality and motor performance. Also, no significant relationships between motor sub-domains and personality were found. It was thus concluded that for the population under study, the domains of motor performance and personality were independent Some discussion of the multivariate technique of canonical correlation was offered and compared with univariate procedures.     

Dynamic and Static Balancing Ability of Preschool Children

Performance differences in dynamic and static balance ability of 150 preschool Ss aged 3,4, and 5 yr. were studied. Ss performed 4 balance-beam tasks and 2 balance-board tasks. An Age by Sex (3 × 2) factorial, design employing both univariate and multivariate ANOVA techniques were the statistics used. For both dynamic and static balance Age was highly significant, and the use of multivariate ANOVA indicated significant sex differences on the static balance tasks. The appropriateness of multivariate techniques where more than one dependent variable is measured on the same population was discussed, and the need to take into account the relationship between these variables when analyzing the data was noted.