The Paradox of Scientific Axioms and Paradigms

It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing?

Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone interested in science has heard of—but both make far more extreme claims than you might think.

The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine, the best place to go online for fact-rich, data-dense articles on science and technology, and how they’ve made the world a better place—or how they might do so in the future. To find all their essays, all for free, go to worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Tom’s new book, Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World

* Wagenmakers’s 2020 study asking scientists how they think about scientific claims

* David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the problem of induction

* Bertrand Russell’s 1946 book History of Western Philosophy

* Popper’s 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Popper

* Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Kuhn

* 2019 Scott Alexander review of the book

* Michael Strevens’s 2020 book The Knowledge Machine

* Daniel Lakens’s Coursera course on “improving your statistical inferences”

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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