- that scientific (funding and intellectual) trajectories are anything
but systematic, progressive or data driven,
- that hypothesis generation and testing - even when not largely
determined by funding or new-technological opportunities - are wildly
contingent on who the researcher is,
- that research methods - while more formal than much of the rest of the
process - are always selected from across a range of options where the means
selected have as much to do with personal preferences and the vagaries of
research programs as with anything else,
- that the actual practice of scientific research/data gathering is at
least as much a craft practice tied to very specific boundary maintenance
practices as it is a systematic activity,
- that data analysis seeks statistically meaningful results more than
anything else, even if those results end up generating a rewriting of the
intent of the work - the hypotheses being tests - when preparing manuscripts
for publication.
All of this stuff, and more, is borne out in the ethnographic, sociological and philosophical literature - from Imre Lakatos to Latour and Woolgar and from Robert Young to Susan Leigh Star - in science studies.
Big/Basic Science exists as a mythological product and high school and college science labs are more legitimatory spectacle than recapitulations of classical scientific practice.
My kids played/learned/explored not at all like our cats did as kittens or as our dog did as a puppy.
Alan
On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 5:33 AM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-09-01 at 01:19 -0700, Chris Doss wrote:
> > Now that I think of it, babies don't have the last one either if you
> include the bit after the esp.
> >
> > If you ascribe science to babies or very young children, you're also
> going to have to ascribe it to puppies and kittens, who act basically the
> same (except that they are actually smarter than human children for the
> first 6 months or so, since they're not born prematurely).
> >
>
> Since when have you studied your baby?
>
> CG
>
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