Sources and glossary
Source discipline
Prefer primary sources. Distinguish observation, interpretation, hypothesis, and demonstrated result. Cite the source that actually supports a claim, and preserve its limits rather than rounding it up to a stronger one.
When only a secondary source is available, say so, and attribute the characterization to the secondary source rather than presenting it as the primary author's own words.
Programme repositories are listed in the research guide. They retain authority over technical claims; this site translates and routes them for readers rather than restating them as its own findings.
Working glossary
Auxiliary hypothesis: a supporting proposal that can be revised or rejected without silently changing every foundational commitment of the programme it belongs to. Part of a programme's protective belt.
Burden of proof: the obligation to supply supporting argument and evidence for a claim. A fair comparison places this obligation symmetrically; applying it only to one side of a debate, or only to the side one already disagrees with, is a comparison failure, not a neutral default.
Canonical programme source: the repository that owns a programme's technical claims and current research status. Where this site and a canonical source appear to disagree, the source controls.
Falsifier: a result that contradicts a specified claim under its stated testing conditions. Whether a particular result actually meets those conditions must be argued, not assumed by either side.
Hard core: the central commitments of a research programme, in the Lakatosian sense, that its adherents treat as not open to revision without abandoning the programme itself.
Historical reconstruction: a proposed account of past events connecting a model to present observations. See methodology for how this site tries to keep reconstruction distinct from observation.
Inference: a conclusion drawn from evidence using stated reasoning and assumptions. Naming the assumptions is part of the inference, not an optional footnote to it.
Methodological naturalism: the working discipline, common in the natural sciences, of explaining a phenomenon under investigation by appeal to natural causes and testable mechanisms. As a method it makes no claim about what does or does not exist beyond nature; that further claim is philosophical naturalism.
Observation: a recorded feature or measurement of the world, in principle checkable by repetition or independent instrument.
Philosophical naturalism: the metaphysical claim that the natural world is all that exists. This is a worldview commitment, not a finding produced by any particular measurement or method, and it is not entailed by methodological naturalism alone.
Presupposition: a foundational commitment that shapes what counts as evidence or a good explanation before a particular argument begins. Presuppositions can be examined, compared, and argued for or against, even though no line of argument starts from a position outside every worldview.
Primary source: a document, dataset, or artifact that directly records an observation, argument, or event, rather than reporting on one already recorded elsewhere.
Progressive / degenerating programme: Imre Lakatos's distinction between a research programme whose successive revisions predict genuinely new facts (progressive) and one whose revisions only accommodate results already known at the time of the revision (degenerating).
Protective belt: the auxiliary hypotheses surrounding a programme's hard core. These absorb the pressure of anomalous results and can be revised, in principle, without abandoning the core itself.
Secondary source: a document that reports, summarizes, or interprets a primary source rather than recording the original observation, measurement, or argument.
Severe test: a test capable of discriminating between competing explanations because a specified, publicly stated outcome would count against the hypothesis under test, not merely be reinterpreted to fit it after the fact.
Worldview: the set of foundational commitments through which a person interprets evidence, arguments, and experience. A worldview is not a conclusion reached free of commitments; it is the framework within which conclusions are reached, and it can itself be examined and compared against alternatives. See compare frameworks.
Cited works
General epistemology and methodology terms used across this site draw on the following, cited here rather than repeated inline on every page that uses them:
- Bayes, T. (1763). "An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 53, 370–418. Communicated posthumously by Richard Price.
- Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson & Co. Expanded English translation of Logik der Forschung (1934/1935).
- Lakatos, I. (1970). "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes." In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (pp. 91–196). Cambridge University Press.
Sources specific to a research programme's own technical claims belong in that programme's own repository, listed at research programmes, and are not duplicated here.