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Scientists looking at the same data can disagree profoundly in their interpretation of those data. The advance of scientific knowledge stands to benefit from such disagreement, and we at Nature Methods see our role as publishers not only of work that presents new advances and reconciles differences, but also of the opinions of dissenting peers.
There is no simple rule for how to best handle disagreement, but a good place to start is to agree on a few definitions. For example, epistemic peers are equals in training and resources with access to the same evidence regarding a particular question. Scientific peer disagreement can be defined as having the same epistemic goal—specifically, to gain knowledge with regard to a given question—but disagreement on how to achieve it. Such disagreement can arise for a variety of reasons: because scientists come from different backgrounds and have different sets of prior assumptions; because different methods are used for data interpretation; or because existing evidence is often incomplete, making it impossible to draw definitive conclusions without gathering more data.
A fascinating example, though admittedly a bit removed from the purview of Nature Methods , is the discussion of whether the small hominid found in a cave in the Indonesian island of Flores in , dubbed Hobbit in the popular press, should be classified as Homo floresiensis , a new hominin species, or represents samples of Homo sapiens suffering from congenital disorders leading to microcephaly and dwarfism.
Although the original debate was based solely on fossil evidence, the dispute has triggered research into the scaling of brain size during severe body reduction and has led to insights suggesting that the relationship is more complex than previously assumed.
More than ten years after the original discovery, research into this classification question is ongoing. By leveraging massively parallel sequencing technology, this group has generated large data sets of DNase I fragments that constitute a fraction of chromatin accessible to binding by regulatory factors. Their research team was the first to systematically derive genome-wide information on transcription factor TF binding from such data, in a process termed digital genomic footprinting.
Genome-wide data on TF occupancy are critical for deriving the architecture of individual regulatory regions as well as for understanding the networks that regulate transcription. The authors describe the key components of the technique, discuss pitfalls and mention the need for improvement, but overall they stress the potential of the method for providing insight into complex TF networks. They point to limitations of genomic footprinting and caution that, because of the short residency time of many TFs on DNA, some footprints are indistinguishable from DNase cutting bias; they argue that those data should thus not be used to derive transcriptional networks.
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Erkenntnis, 72, 17— Download references. The editors would also like to thank the participants at the workshop on Disagreement in Science, hosted at University College Dublin in July You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Reprints and Permissions. Disagreement in science: introduction to the special issue. Synthese , — Download citation. Received : 24 June Accepted : 26 June Published : 10 July Issue Date : November Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Download PDF. Let us now look in more detail at the eight individual papers collected in this special issue. Notes 1. References Baghramian, M. Google Scholar Beebe, J.
Google Scholar Biddle, J. Google Scholar Borg, A. Google Scholar Christensen, D. Google Scholar Cretu, A. Disagreement is thus essential in proving that a theory is correct because a theory that resists disagreement and cannot be proven wrong is a correct theory.
An example of a famous disagreement in the field of astronomy is the great debate between Harlow Sharpley and Heber Courtis in This controversy was related to the scale of the Universe Hoskin While Curtis maintained that the Milky Way comprised the entire universe and the other nebulae were isle galaxies within the Milky Way, Sharpley was determined to demonstrate that the Universe was much larger and the nebulae were galaxies in themselves, rather than parts of our own galaxies. We now know that Sharpley was right in most of his assumptions although technological possibilities of the time did cause him to make some errors.
In the same way, even though Curtis was wrong, some of his theories concerning the stars in the nebulae were proved to be right. This shows the way in which disagreements are useful in advancing knowledge in a certain field. Even though it may happen that neither of the opponents is completely correct, and this occurs frequently since scientific claims are constantly being proved wrong, valorous pieces are kept and other clusters of knowledge are constructed around them.
In the field of human sciences, more exactly, in neuropsychiatry, an equally famous debate is that between Herman von Helmoltz and Ewald Hering which concerned visual perception. The disagreement arose over the mechanisms that stand behind color vision, over the nature of the perception of space as well as over the methods used to experiment on these issues, and involved not only these two scientists, but also their adherents Turner According to Turner , none of the writers were in the end victorious and debates concerning the topic remained open until the twentieth century when new methods of study allowed one view to become more influent than the other.
However, when scientists are not able to prove their claims in a definitive manner, disagreements may create a blockage in the field of knowledge and it is only by the invention of new methods that they may be able to discover which side was right and which was wrong.
The blockage is not beneficial for the scientific community and for the society which cannot benefit from the knowledge gained through scientific debate. In such cased, the finding of a common ground or of an agreement between parties might prove more beneficial than the disagreement in the pursuit of knowledge. Rather, Willinksy claims, these disagreements harm not only the knowledge but also the society as a whole.
Disagreements therefore do not help bilingual education research because the development of various programs only causes confusion in the system.
Disagreements occur all the time in both human and natural sciences as a result of the differences that appear when several people study the same topic. Although the disagreement appears because people generally have different opinions, opinions alone are not enough in a scientific debate. Scientists need objective arguments in order to be able to debate effectively and to demonstrate the accuracy of their opinions. Disagreement is therefore a result of reason and perception.
By reasoning, one comes to a conclusion that is different than that of another person using facts. One can also disagree based on his perceived reality, which may be opposite to the perceived reality of another person.
For example, I used to perceive my father as extremely tall when I was a very little, but I perceive him as rather short now. When I was little, I could easily disagree with anyone who called my father short and now, I might disagree with someone who calls him tall.
However, perception alone is never enough is scientific debates. While perception is necessary in finding the scientific truth, scientific debates need facts which can be derived from experiments and observation in order to be meaningful. By using these methods, one may reach a result that is able to contradict previous assumptions and demonstrate that they are wrong. My own experience with disagreement based on reason was theological in nature.
Because I strongly disagreed with my opponent on matters related to religion, I tried to look for facts that proved my points. The debate which took place on the internet was similar to a scientific debate because it involved an audience formed by other users, of which some supported me while others supported my opponent. Even though the debate between us was very intense and even caused users to switch from one side to another, no conclusion could be reached in the end.
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