The Scientific Method, Modernism, and Postmodernism Revisited: A Reaction to Shephard (1999)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a reaction to Shephard’s (1999) criticism of the July 1998 special issue of the Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly on research assumptions. Shephard’s paper is essentially a defense of the use of the scientific method in adapted physical activity and a critique of his own understanding of the postmodern alternative. He argues that the scientific method is the method adapted physical activity researchers must privilege to know the truth. In this paper, it is argued that Shephard’s description of the scientific method is too general to be useful. In addition, he often confounds traditional modernist issues with postmodernist issues. His depiction of the postmodern alternative is too sketchy to be an adequate critique of the postmodern alternative. This paper highlights key issues unaddressed by Shephard and, as well, outlines some major postmodernist themes so that some of Shephard’s distortions can be corrected.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".