Social Research articles from March 2005

Social Research archives from March 2005

Guest editor's introduction.
March 22, 2005... AT FIRST BLUSH, "SCIENCE" AND "ERROR" SEEM TO BE POLAR OPPOSITES--the one a heroic pursuit of provable and widely sharable truths, the other a miserable exemplar of human frailty. The very definition of the two terms mirrors that polarity, with...

Editor's introduction.
March 22, 2005... WHEN I FIRST BEGAN TO DISCUSS THE THEME OF "ERRORS" WITH MY coeditor for this special issue, Gerald Holton, the question arose as to whether the kinds of "fruitful" mistakes that occur in the natural sciences also occur in the social sciences....

Scientific error and the ethos of belief.
March 22, 2005... INTRODUCTION: KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF FOR THE MODERN SCIENCES, THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN WHAT COUNTS as established and reliable knowledge and what is viewed as hypothesis, conjecture, and tentative belief shifts constantly, according to the...

Becquerel's blunder.(radioactivity discovery)(Henri Becquerel)
March 22, 2005... INTRODUCTION THE DISCOVERY BY WILHELM CONRAD RONTGEN OF X-RAYS IN LATE 1895 was the most globally astonishing scientific event prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. * Some 50 books and pamphlets and 1,000 papers on...

Author of error.(discovery of nuclear reactions)
March 22, 2005... THE NUCLEUS OF ERROR WHEN THE 1938 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS WAS GIVEN TO ENRICO FERMI, the short citation said this: "[F]or his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related...

Tycho and Kepler: solid myth versus subtle truth.(Errors in the Natural Sciences)
March 22, 2005... TYCHO HAS THE WORLD'S FINEST OBSERVATIONS," JOHANNES KEPLER wrote to his teacher, Michael Maestlin, "but he only lacks an architect to construct an edifice out of them." Kepler's remark, echoing down through the centuries, has reinforced a...

Marconi's error: the first transatlantic wireless telegraphy in 1901.(Errors in the Natural Sciences)
March 22, 2005... S... S... S... On the twelfth and thirteenth of December 1901, in St. John's, Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi received an "S... S... S... " on the wireless. On the fourteenth, he called a press conference to announce a groundbreaking...

In search of El Dorado: John Dalton and the origins of the atomic theory.(Errors in the Natural Sciences)
March 22, 2005... THE HISTORIAN OF THE CHEMICAL ATOMIC THEORY EXPERIENCES AN embarrassment of riches--or just embarrassment--when he turns to the origin of the tale. He has a hero--the English Quaker and self-made natural philosopher John Dalton--as well as a...

Kin selection as the key to altruism: its rise and fall.(Errors in the Natural Sciences)
March 22, 2005... ONE OF THE ENDURING UNSETTLED ISSUES OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY is the paradox of collateral altruistic behavior--that is, when some individuals subordinate their own interests and those of their immediate offspring in order to serve the interests...

Errors in economics and their consequences.(Errors in the Social Sciences)
March 22, 2005... "IF ALL ECONOMISTS WERE LAID END TO END, THEY WOULD NOT REACH a conclusion" is a standard witticism about my discipline and one that relates to two made in this paper. First, the witticism itself it simply wrong--a problem that is more...

I think, therefore I err.(Errors in the Social Sciences)
March 22, 2005... They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother, When they said that man could fly. They told Marconi wireless was a phony; It's the same old cry. --IRA GERSHWIN WHY DO WE MAKE ERRORS? ARE THEY BLUNDERS CAUSED BY THE limitations of our...

The two projects of the American social sciences.(Errors in the Social Sciences)
March 22, 2005... THERE ARE INSTANCES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE "TRUTHS" THAT HAVE BEEN subsequently and convincingly demonstrated to be false. Is it useful to label these now discarded truths as social science mistakes? Perhaps, but as argued in this essay, the mistake...

The questionable logic of "mistakes" in the dynamics of knowledge growth in the social sciences.(Errors in Social Sciences)
March 22, 2005... ON RECEIVING AN INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE on errors in science, I immediately responded to the editors that I did not wish to do so because it was a big mistake to think that the logic of "big mistakes" applies to the...