Falsifiability ≈ FalsifiabilityFalsifiability
View article: Criteria for selecting implementation science theories and frameworks: results from an international survey
Criteria for selecting implementation science theories and frameworks: results from an international survey Open
Implementation scientists use a large number of criteria to select theories, but there is little consensus on which are most important. Our results suggest that the selection of implementation theories is often haphazard or driven by conve…
View article
The Value of Dimensional Models of Early Experience: Thinking Clearly About Concepts and Categories Open
We review the three prevailing approaches—specificity, cumulative risk, and dimensional models—to conceptualizing the developmental consequences of early-life adversity and address fundamental problems with the characterization of these fr…
View article
The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations Open
Since the 1970s, serial verb constructions (SVCs) have been discussed widely in African, Oceanic and many other languages throughout the world. This article gives an overview of the most important generalizations about SVCs that have been …
View article
A Unified Framework to Quantify the Credibility of Scientific Findings Open
Societies invest in scientific studies to better understand the world and attempt to harness such improved understanding to address pressing societal problems. Published research, however, can be useful for theory or application only if it…
View article
Do Large Language Models Understand Us? Open
Large language models (LLMs) represent a major advance in artificial intelligence and, in particular, toward the goal of human-like artificial general intelligence. It is sometimes claimed, though, that machine learning is “just statistics…
View article
Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy Open
The replication (replicability, reproducibility) crisis in social psychology and clinical medicine arises from the fact that many apparently well-confirmed experimental results are subsequently overturned by studies that aim to replicate t…
View article
On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs Open
Conspiratorial ideation is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organisations. Many of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures are non-falsifiabl…
View article
Folk Classification and Factor Rotations: Whales, Sharks, and the Problems With the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Open
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) uses factor analysis to group self-reported symptoms of mental illness (i.e., like goes with like). It is hailed as a significant improvement over other diagnostic taxonomies. However, t…
View article
‘Orch OR’ is the most complete, and most easily falsifiable theory of consciousness Open
The 'Orch OR' theory attributes consciousness to quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons. Quantum computers process information as superpositions of multiple possibilities (quantum bits or qubits) which, in Orch OR, are a…
View article
The Origins of Iconic Depictions: A Falsifiable Model Derived from the Visual Science of Palaeolithic Cave Art and World Rock Art Open
Archaeologists have struggled for more than a century to explain why the first representational art of the Upper Palaeolithic arose and the reason for its precocious naturalism. Thanks to new data from various sites across Europe and furth…
View article
What Counts as Evidence for a Logical Theory? Open
Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the Quinean view that logical theories have no special epistemological status, in particular, they are not self-evident or justified a priori. Instead, logical theories are continuous with scientific theo…
View article
Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues Open
The question of what explains individual differences in expertise within complex domains such as music, games, sports, science, and medicine is currently a major topic of interest in a diverse range of fields, including psychology, educati…
View article
Improving Transparency, Falsifiability, and Rigor by Making Hypothesis Tests Machine-Readable Open
Making scientific information machine-readable greatly facilitates its reuse. Many scientific articles have the goal to test a hypothesis, so making the tests of statistical predictions easier to find and access could be very beneficial. W…
View article
Falsification and consciousness Open
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard experim…
View article
Uncovering the genetic blueprint of the <i>C. elegans</i> nervous system Open
Significance A fundamental question of neuroscience is how the brain wires itself. Here, we propose a modeling framework that explains how cellular connectivity emerges from neuronal identity, allowing us to offer experimentally falsifiabl…
View article
Multiscale spacetimes from first principles Open
Assuming only a smooth and slow change of spacetime dimensionality at large scales, we find, in a background- and model-independent way, the general profile of the Hausdorff and the spectral dimension of multiscale geometries such as those…
View article
Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory: Integrating Structure, Dynamics, Temporal Scale, and Levels of Analysis Open
Theoretical accounts of psychopathology often emphasize social context as etiologically centralto psychological dysfunction, and interpersonal impairments are widely implicated for many legacy diagnostic categories that span domains of psy…
View article
Data mining fool’s gold Open
The scientific method is based on the rigorous testing of falsifiable conjectures. Data mining, in contrast, puts data before theory by searching for statistical patterns without being constrained by prespecified hypotheses. Artificial int…
View article
The Value of Dimensional Models of Early Experience: Thinking Clearly about Concepts and Categories Open
We review the three prevailing approaches—specificity, cumulative risk, and dimensional models— to conceptualizing the developmental consequences of early-life adversity and address fundamental problems with the characterization of these f…
View article
Modeling Imaginary Worlds: Version 4 of the AMCP Format for Formulary Submissions Open
The question of demarcation between normal science and pseudoscience is critical to the discovery of new facts. The core elements supporting progress in science are: (i) empirically evaluable coherent theories and (ii) the testing of hypot…
View article
Learnability and falsifiability of Construction Grammars Open
The strength of Construction Grammar (CxG) is its descriptive power; its weakness is the learnability and falsifiability of its unconstrained representations. Learnability is the degree to which the optimum set of constructions can be cons…
View article
Cyber-Empathic Design: A Data-Driven Framework for Product Design Open
A critical task in product design is mapping information from consumer to design space. Currently, this process largely depends on designers identifying and mapping psychological and consumer level factors to engineered attributes. In this…
View article
A Unified Framework to Quantify the Credibility of Scientific Findings Open
Societies invest in scientific studies to better understand the world, and attempt to harness such improved understanding to address pressing societal problems. Published research, however, can only be useful for theory or application if i…
View article
Towards falsifiable interpretability research Open
Methods for understanding the decisions of and mechanisms underlying deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on building intuition by emphasizing sensory or semantic features of individual examples. For instance, methods aim to visualiz…
View article
The Reality of “Real-Life” Neuroscience: A Commentary on Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn (2019) Open
The main thrust of Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn’s ecological approach is that “the use of real-life complex, dynamic, naturalistic stimuli provides a solid basis for understanding brain and behavior” (p. 851). Although we support the overa…
View article
The use of detrital zircon data in terrane analysis: A nonunique answer to provenance and tectonostratigraphic position in the Scandinavian Caledonides Open
The Scandinavian Caledonides are conventionally described as a stack of parautochthonous to allochthonous nappes with more exotic units residing at structurally higher levels, from Baltica derived at the base to Laurentia derived at the to…
View article
Smart Cities and Transportation: Reviewing the Scientific Character of the Theories Open
The concept “smart city” nowadays designates a plethora of things. The multiple meanings associated with the smart city, and its imperfect synonym the “robotic city”, continue to provide a topic of debate. In this paper we aim to present a…
View article
Answering Questions About the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): Analogies to Whales and Sharks Miss the Boat Open
In this commentary, we discuss questions and misconceptions about the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) raised by Haeffel et al. We explain what the system classifies and why it is descriptive and atheoretical, and we highli…
View article
The neuroconnectionist research programme Open
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) inspired by biology are beginning to be widely used to model behavioral and neural data, an approach we call neuroconnectionism. ANNs have been lauded as the current best models of information processing i…
View article
The problem of choosing between irreconcilable theoretical orientations: Comment on Melchert (2016). Open
Melchert (2016) argued that knowledge of psychological processes is now grounded in experimental tests of falsifiable theories that support a unified, paradigmatic understanding of human psychology. Although his argument for leaving behind…