Metascience

Peer review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but it is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher. Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that rewards scientists for peer reviewing other scientists’ work and that builds up trust and reputation. We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open anonymous peer reviews on Ethereum. If requirements are met, peer reviews will be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality. To promote ethical behaviour and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified mech...

No distinctive feature seems to fit the process of philosophical inquiry other than the act of deliberation common to any other rational enterprise. I will argue for a heuristic- and erotetic based approach for posing and solving philosophical problems. A set theoretic view of philosophical inquiry asserts that general statements are truth conditions for the specific concepts they entail (i.e. for these to be meaningful in a common background) and remain presupposed even when adopting the form of an implicature. It is the job of philosophers with scientific training to unearth them, or  scientists with philosophical vocation to propose them as a means of clarifying scientific knowledge.

By Zulumathabo Zulu Abstract The African native commands an erudite capital in terms of the African origin and contribution with respect to civilization, symbolic behaviour, cosmic knowledge, metascience, medicine, engineering, technology, mathematics, writing systems and inventions. This plethora of uncontested knowledge domains by the African should be adequate to embolden the African to be the master of his/her destiny but that is not the case because the African feels like his/her knowledge does not count as real knowledge.

The exposure of most Metascience readers to scholarship about medieval technology is probably limited to the work of the first generation of historians of technology. Lewis Mumford, Lynn White Jr, Bertrand Gille, Robert Forbes (and of slightly later vintage, Jean Gimpel) have all ...

Metascientific ontology differs from philosophical ontologies in its objectives, objects and methods. By an examination of the ontological theories of Mario Bunge, we will show their main objective is a unified representation of the world as known through the sciences, that their objects of study are scientific concepts, and that their methods do not differ from those that one expects to find in any rational activity. Metascientific ontology is therefore not transcendent because it does not seek to represent non-concrete objects alien to the world we inhabit and to the sciences that study it, and therefore does not need special faculties and methods to carry out its research. Metascientific ontology is a general scientific discourse on the world because it was designed by and for the sciences.

This first issue of Mεtascience is a posthumous tribute to Mario Bunge, who died in February 2020. This is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that thinkers pay homage to Mario Bunge or that his work is the subject of study, and rightly so, because the man is a humanist and the work worthy heiress of the Enlightenment. Bunge has made a significant contribution to a wide range of disciplines: physics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cognitive sciences. This issue is also a way to make his thoughts known to a French-speaking readership.

Peer review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but it is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher. Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchainbased incentive system that rewards scientists for peer reviewing other scientists' work and that builds up trust and reputation. We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open anonymous peer reviews on Ethereum. If requirements are met, peer reviews will be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality. To promote ethical behaviour and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified mechanism that allows the whole community to evaluate the peer reviews and vote for the best ones.

In diesem Beitrag skizzieren wir die ‚Psychological Humanities' als einen neuen interdisziplinären Ansatz, der die Psychologie in den Mittelpunkt der wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung rückt. Die Rele-vanz einer solchen Betrachtungsweise ergibt sich nicht nur aus der zunehmenden Psychologisierung verschiedener gesellschaftlicher und kultureller Bereiche, sondern auch aus mehreren aktuellen Vorfällen innerhalb der akademischen Psychologie, etwa der ‚replication crisis' oder dem ‚Hoffman-Bericht' über die mögliche Beteiligung von Psycholog_innen an militärischer Folter. Wir argumen-tieren, dass die Psychological Humanities ein Feld der Reflexion eröffnen können, das eine viel-schichtige Kritik an psychologischem Wissen und seinen jeweiligen Praktiken ermöglicht. In unse-rem Beitrag stellen wir das Lübecker Modell der Psychological Humanities vor, das zwei Perspekti-ven beinhaltet: (1) den geisteswissenschaftlichen Blick von außen auf die Psychologie, der insbeson-dere Ansätze aus der Wissenschaftsgeschichte und aus der Kulturwissenschaft einsetzt; (2) unter-schiedliche theoretische Perspektiven innerhalb der Psychologie, die erkenntnistheoretische Ansätze, pluralistische Zugänge zum Psychischen und ethische Positionen umfassen. Daraufhin wird der Ansatz der Psychological Humanities am Beispiel von Trauma konkretisiert. Abschließend werden Differenzen und Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den Psychological Humanities und dem bereits etablier-ten Bereich der Medical Humanities aufgezeigt. Insgesamt plädieren wir dafür, dass es für die Psy-chologie an der Zeit ist, sich selbst, ihren Gegenstand und ihre Effekte eingehender zu reflektieren, um sich ihrer gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung umfassender zu stellen. * * * Psychological Humanities as a reflective moment of psychology In this paper, we sketch Psychological Humanities as a novel interdisciplinary approach that takes psychology as its object of investigation. The importance of such an approach can be found not only in the increasing psychologization of various social and cultural arenas, but also in several recent developments in academic psychology, such as the 'replication crisis' and the Hoffman report on the participation of psychologists in abusive military interrogation programs. We argue that Psychological Humanities can open a field of reflection in which a multi-layered critique of psychological knowledge and its practices can be realized. In our contribution, we present the Lübeck Model of Psychological Humanities, entailing two perspectives: (1) the humanities' view of psychology from the outside, using approaches from the history of science and cultural studies in particular; (2) different theoretical perspectives from the field of psychology, including epistemological approaches, pluralistic theories of the human psyche, and ethical positions. To elucidate the approach of Psychological Humanities, we take trauma as an example. Finally, the paper highlights differences and similarities between Psychological Humanities and the already established field of Medical Humani

Debates about the links between science and ontology are very active in contemporary philosophy, and, in fact, they have always been present. Despite the various philosophical positions on the subject, they all admit the existence of a metaphysical reality. In contrast, metascience holds that such a reality does not exist. This second issue of Mɛtascience presents seven out of twelve articles that have as a common thread either the metascientific ontology or the Bungean ontology. RÉSUMÉ-Les débats sur les liens qui uniraient la science à l'ontologie sont très actifs en philosophie contemporaine, et, en fait, ils ont toujours été présents. Malgré les diverses positions philosophiques sur le sujet, elles admettent toutes l'existence d'une réalité métaphysique. À l'opposé, la métascience soutient qu'une telle réalité n'existe pas. Ce second numéro de Mɛtascience présente sept articles sur douze qui ont comme fil conducteur soit l'ontologie métascientifique soit l'ontologie bungéenne. Contents

En cualquier estudio científico podemos encontrar dos tipos de errores. Por un lado, los errores aleatorios, distribuidos de forma azarosa y con carácter puntual, que afectan fundamentalmente a la precisión de los resultados. Por otra parte, los errores sistemáticos o sesgos son debidos a errores en el diseño o en el procedimiento mediante el que éste es ejecutado en el desarrollo de los estudios, así como en la fundamentación de la hipótesis, en el apoyo documental, en el análisis de los resultados o en la elaboración de las conclusiones. En definitiva, un sesgo es un error que se repite procedimentalmente y, por ello, no suele afectar a la precisión pero sí puede afectar de forma muy relevante a la exactitud, esto es, a la veracidad de los resultados en relación al objetivo del estudio en cuestión, invalidándolos en mayor o menor grado. El sesgo de publicación supone un tipo de sesgo de selección, por el que el investigador considera erróneamente que solo los estudios previamente publicados sobre una cuestión en particular son los únicos realizados, lo que supone una alteración de los resultados de la investigación debido a la tendencia editorial de publicar preferente o exclusivamente resultados positivos –que confirman de forma estadísticamente significativa la hipótesis del estudio–, ignorando aquellas investigaciones que reportan solo una tendencia o relación estadísticamente no significativa entre las variables que se investigan. Esto afecta decisivamente a la diseminación del conocimiento científico, alterando el impacto que un determinado resultado genera –o deja de hacerlo– sobre el conocimiento de la investigación en curso y su ignorancia o desdén voluntario pueden ser causa de la obtención de conclusiones erróneas en una investigación en curso sobre la materia implicada.
Por su parte, los sesgos editoriales surgen como consecuencia de retardar o negar la publicación de estudios por criterios no científicos; es decir, prejuicios sobre autores, país o continente de procedencia del artículo, centro académico o institución, publicación previa o no en la revista, costes de edición, pertenencia o no a determinados grupos cooperativos o sobre el idioma, entre otros. Obviamente, resultan tan negativos desde el punto de vista del rigor científico como los sesgos de publicación y el numeroso resto de tipos de sesgos conocidos.
En resumen, el conocimiento de los sesgos en la investigación científica es fundamental para poder prevenirlos o, al menos, reducir su impacto hasta un mínimo aceptable que garantice la veracidad de los resultados y de las conclusiones que puedan obtenerse de aquellos. Afortunadamente, la ciencia es –por definición– autocrítica, lo que permite conocer el diagnóstico y el tratamiento preventivo y curativo de los sesgos.