flâneur

Field Essentialism, Field Realism, Field Pragmatism

macroscience.org · 1,017 words · saved by 1 readers

Scholarly fields – economics, physics, computer science – are the basic units for thinking about metascience.

Scholarly fields – economics, physics, computer science – are the basic units for thinking about metascience. Explorations into the determinants of successful research often structure the data by academic field. Proposals to improve the rate of progress often intervene at the level of a field. The field is to science as the nation-state is to geopolitics. Given that fields operate as such a basic primitive for how we mentally organize science, it behooves us to ask basic philosophical questions about what fields represent. Why is it exactly that we end up with mathematics being separate…

related reading