Why do neuro- & psychological scientists cling to archaic forms of philosophy of science, like thinking theories' are useful only if they predict or that we routinely falsify theories in our (sub)fields?

Is it a lack of exposure to philosophy & history of science?



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For predicting (also see @IrisVanRooij et al), there's nothing special there. You get predictions "for free" with linguistic statements which we would not be comfortable claiming meet the criteria for being theories. Thus "predictive power" isn't something unique to theories.

2/

For falsification (see Lakatos), it's not how we abandon theories in cognitive sciences (incl. neuro & psych). That's not to say it's not a useful/appealing property — in fact computational models can ensure that for us (see work w/ @andrea_e_martin, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rybh9).

3/

*That, above, being falsifiability, of course.

I might add more to this thread, but for now I'm not feeling super well so I'll concentrate on chilling.

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