Abstract
The first stages of a research program involve choice of interesting topics or problems, and then identification of particular issues to investigate. The research is given direction by development of specific questions that the program aims to answer. These questions are based on an understanding—an informal model, perhaps—of how something works, or interacts, or behaves. They establish a framework for making observations about the object being studied. This framework can be characterised as a statement of belief about how the object behaves—in other words, a hypothesis.
The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.
P.B. Medawar
Advice to a Young Scientist
The great tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
T.H. Huxley
Biogenesis and Abiogenesis
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition ... Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
Monty Python
The Argument Sketch
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Notes
- 1.
Which can, of course, lead to the discovery that the theorem is wrong after all.
- 2.
An example of pseudoscience in computing are schemes for high-performance video compression that promised delivery of TV-quality data over low-bandwidth modems. In the 1990s, the commercial implications of such systems were enormous, and this incentive created ample opportunities for fraud. In one case, for example, millions of dollars were scammed from investors with tricks such as hiding a video player inside a PC tower and hiding a network cable inside a power cable. Yet, skeptically considered, such schemes are implausible. For example, with current technology, even a corner of a single TV-resolution image—let alone 25 frames—cannot be compressed into the 7 kilobytes that such a modem could transmit per second. Uncompressed, the bandwidth of a modem was only sufficient for one byte per row per image, or, per image, about the space needed to transmit a desktop icon. A further skeptical consideration in this case was that an audio signal was also transmitted. Had the system been legitimate, the inventor must have developed new solutions to the independent problems of image compression, motion encoding, and audio compression.
- 3.
In another variant of this theme, objects of the same type were clustered together using some kind of similarity metric. Then the patterns of clustering were analyzed, and objects that clustered in similar ways were supposed to have similar subject matter. Although it is disguised by the use of clustering, to be successful such an approach assumes an underlying universal matching method.
- 4.
An interesting question is how to regard “Zipf’s law”. This observation—“law” seems a poor choice of terminology in this context—is if nothing else a curious case study. Zipf’s books may be widely cited but they are not, I suspect, widely read. In Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley, 1949), Zipf used languages and word frequencies as one of several examples to illustrate his observation, but his motivation for the work is not quite what might be expected. He states, for example, that his research “define[s] objectively what we mean by the term personality” (p. 18), explains the “drives of the Freudian death wish” (p. 17), and “will provide an objective language in terms of which persons can discuss social problems impersonally” (p. 543). It “will help to protect mankind from the virtual criminal action of persons in strategic political, commercial, social, intellectual and academic positions” (p. 544) and “as the authority of revealed religion and its attendant ethics declines, something must take its place ... I feel that this type of research may yield results that will fulfill those needs” (p. 544). Perhaps these extraordinary claims are quirks, and in any case opinions do not invalidate scientific results. But it has been argued that the behaviour captured by Zipf’s conjecture is a simple consequence of randomness, and, for the example for which the conjecture is often cited (distribution of words in text), the fit between hypothesis and observation is not always strong.
- 5.
Two philosophers are arguing in a bar. The barman goes over to them and asks, “What are you arguing about?”
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“We’re debating whether computer science is a science”, answers one of them.
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“And what do you conclude?” asks the barman.
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“We’re not sure yet,” says the other. “We can’t agree on what ‘is’ means”.
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- 6.
But, in fairness, the views here have the same limitations, as they are those of a computer scientist who believes that the discipline stands alongside the traditional sciences.
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Zobel, J. (2014). Hypotheses, Questions, and Evidence. In: Writing for Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6639-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6639-9_4
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