Dialogues about the practice of science

Dialogues about the practice of science
- January 28, 2025
- PNAS Special Feature co-curated by UC Irvine professor Joachim Vandekerckhove emphasizes flexibility, pluralism, and critical reflection in scientific practice
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A new PNAS Special Feature co-curated by UC Irvine cognitive sciences professor Joachim Vandekerckhove brings
together perspectives from cognitive and social sciences, statistical and methodological
sciences, computer sciences, and history and philosophy of science on the general
practice of science. Topics covered in the special feature include the reproducibility
crisis, measurement and parsimony of explanation, scientific gatekeeping by funding
agencies, peer review processes, and journals, and the impact of automation, machine
learning, and artificial intelligence on the practice of science.
Among the eight included essays are co-authored works by Vandekerckhove as well as Lauren Ross, logic & philosophy of science associate professor.
Vandekerckhove – who also co-designed the special feature cover art – specializes in psychometrics, Bayesian statistics, cognitive modeling, and the science of science. His co-authored essay takes on the topic of making sound replication decisions. The work offers an examination of different scientific values and cognitive attitudes that play a role when scientists decide whether to replicate a finding and how, and provides a conceptual framework for assessing the usefulness of various replication tools, such as registered reports and large-scale replication efforts.
Ross, who specializes in general philosophy of science as well as the philosophy of biology, neuroscience, and medicine, co-authored an essay examining the parsimony principle – the preference for simple explanations over more complex models. After a careful review of current practices, she and co-authors conclude that more complex models are sometimes essential for scientific progress. They close with a discussion on the ways in which parsimony and complexity can play complementary roles in scientific modeling practice.
“A key takeaway from this special feature is that science is not a static endeavor but a dynamic process that can and should adapt to new challenges and opportunities,” says Vandekerckhove. “It is our hope that these essays will be of interest to many scientists and spark even more debate and thought about these critical issues than has already appeared in journals, blogs, and public dissemination.”
Other co-editors of the Special Feature are Richard Shiffrin and Jennifer Trueblood of Indiana University and David Kellen of Syracuse University.
Special Features in PNAS are carefully curated collections of articles that delve into important topics relevant to PNAS readers and often embrace interdisciplinary approaches on emerging issues or areas currently underrepresented in PNAS. All articles undergo a rigorous review process and organizers and participating authors must declare relevant competing interests. For more information about Special Features click here.
-pictured top to right: An artistic representation of the topic of the Special Feature "Dialogues about the practice of science." The topics of the dialogues included the interacting roles of scientific observation (symbolized by a microscope and a telescope), experimentation (a bubbling flask and a rat in a maze), theory (a directed acyclic graph and a mathematical function), and analysis (a neural network and a histogram with overlaid distributions). A final topic of discussion was the role of automation and artificial intelligence (symbolized by a stylized brain with electronic circuitry). Courtesy of Holly Westfall (artist) and Joachim Vandekerckhove (UC Irvine). Vandekerckhove and Ross.
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