Scientific Progress, Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park

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...

Park et al. Reply

Reply to Drs. Park & Shin's letter.

We appreciate the Letter to the Editor by Drs. Park and Shin regarding our recentmanuscript describing a case of reversible Henoch–Schönlein purpura (HSP) complicating adalimumab (ADA) therapy. We are thankful for their attention to our work and for the interesting arguments raised for our consideration. In the face of such uncertainty in the pathogenesis of HSP related to anti-TNFα therapy (pa...

Reply to the Comment by Park and Ho

Park and Ho [1] correctly point out an error in the surface term (9) of Ref. [2], and the consequent lack of antisymmetry in the Poisson brackets (13) of that paper. The root of the problem is that the surface term fails to make the action sufficiently " differentiable " : the diffeomorphisms of interest, given by eqns. (17)-(18) of Ref. [2], do not satisfy the boundary conditions (described af...

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...