Term dilution; or, that phrase, you keep using it...

As the terminology wars between "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" afficionados demonstrate, as soon as you stick a label on what you are doing, someone will come along and co-opt it. Sometimes, as with F/OSS, there are real disagreements to be had by reasonable people; at other times, well, not so much. This:

"Open science" is liberated from methodological naturalism (MN), even though it begins with an MN position. That is, all scientists start their work in pursuit of natural explanations for events or natural solutions for problems. If evidence and logic point to an end of the road for natural explanations, on rare occasions a scientist using open science would be willing to consider an explanation which does not force him to a naturalistic conclusion. For instance, the genetic code stored in the DNA molecule has no precedent in naturalism, since all codes are the product of a mind. Open science would allow possible supernatural causation as a topic for further research. The scientist would not be restricted to naturalism as the only explanatory option. But alas! Professional scientists do not practice open science. They practice "closed science."
has most emphatically nothing whatsoever to do with Open Science in the sense in which I -- and my friends, colleagues and allies in the nascent movement, see e.g. blogroll to right -- use the term.


Comments

Oh my!

Comment number: 017245   Posted by: Jean-Claude Bradley on April 14, 2008 12:31 PM from IP: 216.164.143.138

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