Talk:Science/Outline

 See Talk:Science/Outline discussion for discussion on this draft outline 


 * Lede

History of Science

 * Needham's Grand Question
 * Formulations
 * Why didn't science arise in China? -- Falsified by Lu Gwei-djen's dad in 1930s & afterward
 * Why didn't scientific method arise in China? -- somewhat justified by POV of Taoism
 * Why didn't science and civilization recover as fast in the Ming dynasty (Needham calls Ming science 'decadent'. The Ming came after the Mongols -- the Yuan dynasty) as compared to Europe of the same epoch
 * Fara's version, p.53 'the Needham problem' Why didn't the mathematical natural science happening during European Renaissance  also occur in China?
 * Fara's version (p.54) of Nathan Sivin's answer to 'Needham problem': China's feudal society had not evolved mercantile capitalism, as was occurring in Europe at that time.
 * NB: Needham was 94 by the time of his last contributions to 1995 SCC 7.2, having expended his life falsifying the question. I find SCC 7.2 to be a repetitive shadow of the SCC volumes from 50 years earlier.
 * Fara's restatement (p.54) of 'Needham problem': "How did European activities lead to the form of science that now dominates the entire world?"
 * NB see the graphs in 7.2 which shows how soon China's science integrated with rest of world's science. Chinese medicine, in particular has not yet integrated, in Needham's graphs.
 * Fara, Patricia (2009) Science : a four thousand year history Oxford: Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0-19-922689-4 pp.53-54. See entire chapter, "China", as well as Notes, and Sources --Ancheta Wis (talk) 19:43, 19 October 2011 (UTC), and 01:27, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Pre-modern Science

 * Ancient Near East
 * Greek world
 * India
 * China
 * Islamic world
 * Medieval Europe

Modern Science

 * Early Modern Europe
 * Modern Science (In text links to disciplinary histories)

Philosophy

 * The concept of natural law, and the nature of truth
 * Critique of the possibility of the above (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend)

Deductive science

 * Formal deduction
 * Limits of deduction (Russell, Godel)
 * Contemporary responses

Inductive science

 * Induction
 * Arguments against induction (Hume)
 * Positivism (Popper; Durkheim)
 * Constructivist approaches (Kuhn, Lakatos; ?Habermas, ?Foucault)
 * Anything that pops up in field review articles from the last 20 years of Philosophy of Science journals we haven't got

Mathematics and formal sciences

 * Proof
 * Completeness
 * Internal consistency

Theory and Hypothesis

 * Prediction as compared with
 * Explanation

Test, Experiment, Observation

 * Experiment
 * Observation

Analysis

 * Quantitative method, regression searching (econometrics)
 * Qualitative method
 * Discourse analysis, etc.

Research reporting and peer review

 * Scientific publication, academic journal
 * Peer review, review article, large scale reviews

Institutions

 * Learned societies
 * Research councils
 * Academic journals