Talk:Generative science

Odd
Seems odd that economics, esp. microeconomics, is missing. --Nick 21:51, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Missing
This important article completely lacks information on the origin of the concept "generative science". Morton Shumway (talk) 23:27, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Further reading list
The article has a large list of books for "further reading" which are more or less by definition not cited in the article. It is always hard to know what such a list might be for: if the books were seminal in the field, they would surely have been cited by now. Two other possibilities are that the books a) sound good, being by major authors, and are included to lend an air of authority to the article and the field; or in some cases b) have been added by the authors for self-publicity. Given these risks, there is in general very little justification for a "further reading" section. If an early work genuinely contributed to the founding of a field, it can simply be mentioned in the main text or a history section; otherwise, deletion is the right option. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:10, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Removed a citation that does not appear to have been published.
This citation: Gruene-Yanoff, Till (2006) Agent-Based Simulation, Generative Science, And Its Explanatory Claims. in Models and Simulations. Paris. seems to be to a talk, and surely therefore does not satisfy Wikipedia's requirement for peer review in WP:RS. It is listed on the author's home page, but does not appear in the volume of Synthese here nor is it in the PhilSci archive here. I have removed the citation. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 14:08, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Original research and/or unwarranted synthesis and/or pseudoscience
This article has been greatly trimmed from what it was like a month ago, but it still has an overall quality of going well beyond the cited references into a realm where words like Weltanshauung are used as if to obfuscate and make grandiose. The topic is practical methods that can be used to suggest hypotheses about the real world. The automata that are used are (1) finite-state and (2) deterministic. The field of automata theory deals with finite-state automata that are not guaranteed to complete their calculations within finite time, and I suspect that this has lead some who have read some automata theory to think of this subject, generative science, as far more abstruse than it actually is.

Free will, its presence or absence, is really only a misconception, the result of free-reign imagining about generative methods without understanding them. That imagining has brought the material on this page into the realm of pseudoscience, which is not appropriate. As a first step to making it comprehensible and within the realm of science, I would like to delete two sections that are currently on the page, called "Determinism and the social sciences" and "Implications". Sminthopsis84 (talk) 17:53, 4 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes. The synthesis has been on the page more than long enough, I'm cutting it now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:10, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Anything here beyond self-organization?
Is there anything in "generative science" beyond the agreed topic of self-organization? If there isn't, then a merge to that article would be in order. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:13, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, generative grammar doesn't fit into self-organization, and I think there must be other systems that are like it in attempting to model known systems as sets of rules but without necessarily any emergent behaviour to be studied, what might perhaps be called discovering which components of the natural system are not covered by the model. Neural nets are rather a borderline case; they could perhaps be called self-organizing in that they can respond to training, but they could perhaps be called analytic in that they create rules. I think this page needs another definition beyond the one already quoted. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 16:13, 5 January 2017 (UTC)