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Record W2119584972 · doi:10.4033/iee.2011.4.1.c

What is theory?

2011· article· en· W2119584972 on OpenAlex
Root Gorelick

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueIdeas in Ecology and Evolution · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsEmpirical researchSet (abstract data type)Contrast (vision)Test theoryEpistemologyWork (physics)Mathematical economicsComputer scienceMathematicsArtificial intelligenceStatistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Theory is vital in science, including evolution and ecology, yet is seldom defined. Theory is often amorphously described as anything abstract or mathematical or is simply defined as the opposite of empirical work. By contrast, I explicitly define theory as the formation of testable hypotheses, while defining empirical work as hypothesis testing. This pair of definitions highlights the false dichotomy between theory and empirical work insofar as models, mathematics, and methods do not fall in either category, but instead provide the operational link between theory and empirical work. While multiple hypotheses and auxiliary assumptions may be too intertwined to discern which one is actually falsified by a given data set, hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing are still stalwarts of science.  Finally, I discuss the odd structure of theoretical papers and proposals within a tripartite parsing of science composed of theory, empirical work, and math/models/methods.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.185
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.037
GPT teacher head0.216
Teacher spread0.179 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it