Epistemology
An annotated collection of 4 books & papers on epistemology, spanning 1942 to 2017. Featuring works by Robert K. Merton, Karl Popper, Peter B. Medawar and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Normative Structure of Science
Merton's 1942 essay codifies the norms that he argued had made science work: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism — the CUDOS norms that became the founding text of the sociology of science.…
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
Popper's central claim: what makes a theory scientific is not that it can be confirmed but that it can be refuted, and the growth of knowledge happens through bold conjectures followed by serious attempts to disprove the…
The Art of the Soluble
Medawar, a Nobel-winning biologist, argues that good science is not about tackling the hardest problems but about choosing the ones that can actually be solved with the tools available — the art is in the picking. The bo…
The Problem of Irreproducible Bioscience Research
Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, writes about the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research from inside the discipline. The piece is clear-eyed about the structural causes — career incentives, publicat…