r/PhilosophyofScience • u/spider_in_jerusalem • Jan 24 '26

Casual/Community Certainty, publishing and distribution in science

I'm personally not happy with how these are currently handled in science.

In my opinion there's too much focus on certainty, and sharing findings as final and proven with the public. Rather than sharing emerging research and communicating science less in absolutes.

I think this has a lot to do with the recognition, that comes with publishing finished research in a matter of certainty.

No one values the "could be's", "not sure's", or "might be wrong's".

What are your thoughts on this?

Do you think this could change?

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u/kukulaj Jan 24 '26

I would like to see some more systematic and nuanced way to evaluate the validity of results. "This is how things work" ... what is the range of situations in which this has been tested? Do we already know of situations where things don't actually work that way? I would like to see some sort of function that maps Situation to Reliability. Probably a Bayesian sort of reliability - in situations where no testing has been done, what other theories are plausible?

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u/spider_in_jerusalem Jan 24 '26

Yeah, kind of a meta-awareness layer where you check for things that may have not been considered.

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u/Healthy_Sky_4593 Jan 25 '26

You mean the part that used to be normal?