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Scientific Papers Have Various Structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Valerie Gray Hardcastle*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati and Virginia Tech

Abstract

Fred Suppe claims that the refereed journal article is an appropriate unit of scientific debate for philosophical analysis. He also claims that when we regiment scientific papers correctly, we can see that the hypothetico-deductive method, Baysian induction, and inference to the best explanation fail to capture the structure of scientific articles adequately. In what follows I demonstrate that the coding scheme Suppe used for uncovering the structure of a scientific paper is not appropriate under all circumstances, illustrate alternative structures found in various scientific articles, and show that the hypothetico-deductive method can accommodate the alternative structures I find. My conclusions are that the article that Suppe analyzed is not paradigmatic of published scientific articles, that different papers have different structures, that the structure depends upon the rhetorical goals of the article, and that, because of the different structures and different goals, no one philosophical account of testing is going to suffice.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061–0126.

An early version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy Department at the University of Cincinnati. I give my thanks to the audience there, especially Ted Morris, for helpful comments and discussion. My thanks go also to Owen Flanagan for suggesting several stylistic corrections. Finally, two anonymous referees made several detailed and useful suggestions for improvement. This paper was completed while I was a Taft Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cincinnati; I thank them for their generous support.

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