Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding

Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding.

What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scie...

The Evolution of Knowledge Systems: Narrative Knowledge versus Scientific Knowledge

This paper discusses two types of knowledge that are generated by cultural anthropology, narrative knowledge and scientific knowledge. The argument of this article is that narrative knowledge an older form of knowledge that dates to the time when the brain was evolving its capacity for cultural communication, and that scientific knowledge is more recent and depends on writing and other more ela...

Scientific progress versus ecological influence on Schistosoma mansoni transmission.

PROGRESS REPORT: Active Knowledge Structures in Natural Language Understanding

In the case of the other semantics-based parser PM, Jerry Ball took two of the texts from the Navy message database and added the vocabulary from those messages to the parser's lexicon. After a small amount of modification, the parser was able to parse about 80% of the sentences in those two messages into reasonable representations. With some additional work this percentage can be improved. Giv...

Constants and scientific progress.

Scientists like constants (a personal favorite is Avogadro's number). It is no wonder, because not only does defining a constant represent a major scientific breakthrough, but as human beings we like things we can rely on, things that stay the same and that bring us consistency, stability, and a way to understand ourselves and the world around us. On the other hand, scientists create and welcom...