With a full agenda ahead, but with no specific duties during the day other than enjoying presentations and intellectual discussions, I woke up rather optimistically. Obviously, this is another way of writing that it was going to be a rather …
Science
Today was The Big Day: Finally, the moment had arrived that I would be able to present my paper to the people attending to the methodological pluralism workshop. After a nice breakfast in the hotel lounge, I headed off to …
Today I’ve presented my paper titled `Uncertainty as a guiding principle in methodological pluralism’ Below the paper, the presentation, and the text belonging to the presentation are available for download. Reactions and discussion (both privately and via the comments) will …
From april 11th to april 16th of 2008, I will be attending the “ECPR 2008 Joint Sessions of Workshops. This year, this conference will be held in Rennes, France. This conference consists of numerous workshops on widely different topics. Each …
Is there an afterlife? Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, thinks so based on his own, empirical research. He recently received a lot of attention when he published his book (2007). This book is a popularized elaboration of an article …
I have been writing about the philosophy of science a lot recently. Especially the theory ladenness of observations has received some attention. I know that this is a topic with a high level of abstaction, not easily appreciated by the …
In the field of social health research, it has been shown difficult to disentangle the correlation between poor health and low social economic status (SES) into causal effects in either direction. Both causal interpretations seem plausible: when in poor health, …
Little is definitively known about how the interplay between `nature’ and `nurture’ brings about the (social) world as we know it. Nevertheless, huge amounts of knowledge on the importance of both nature as well as nurture amasses. Take for instance …
Writing about the philosophy of science sometimes has a tendency to become a little abstract in nature. It also has some historical connotations: although there is heavy discussion whether or not philosophical arguments can be supported by examples, it is …
Research on the social determinants of good / poor health has a long tradition, in which the finding that those more privileged in society are generally in better health is one of the most consistent finding in social epidemiology (House,2002) …
