The diagnosis, investigation, and management of ovarian cancer are in a state of flux-balancing ever rapid advances in our understanding of its biology with 3 decades of clinical trials. Clinical trials that started with empirically driven selections have evolved in an evidence-informed manner to gradually improve outcome. Has this improved understanding of the biology and associated calls to a...

This essay contributes to the growing critique of policy science‘s dominant neopositivist methodologies. Not only is neopositivist policy science seen to have failed in its effort to develop a usable body of predictive generalizations, it has been unable to supply effective solutions to social problems. An important part of this failure is traced to outmoded epistemological assumptions. Drawing...

The view of linguistics which we will consider in this chapter is empiricist in the sense explored in Chapter One of this book:1 it is epistemologically empiricist, rather than psychologically empiricist; in fact, it is a view that is rather agnostic about psychology — ready to cooperate with psychology and psychologists, but from a certain respectful distance. It is empiricist in the belief th...

1 The Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States of America, 2 Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States of America, 3 Department of Integrative Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States of America, 4 Division of Infectious Diseases, ...

The main goal of AI and Robotics is that of creating a humanoid robot that can interact with human beings. Such an android would have to have the ability to acquire knowledge about the world it inhabits. Currently, the gaining of beliefs through testimony is hardly investigated in AI because researchers have uncritically accepted empiricism. Great emphasis is placed on perception as a source of...

1. Introduction 2. What philosophical/methodological issues? 3. Philsophy of science and empirical modeling: Logical positivism/empiricism The downfall of logical positivism/empiricism The new experimentalism Learning from error 4. The Error-Statistical perspective: Statistical inference and its philosophical foundations Statistical Induction and its underlying reasoning Severe testing reasonin...