Kuhnian Paradigm Research Articles

Paradigma Thomas Kuhn dan Relevansinya Terhadap Perkembangan Keilmuan Islam di Indonesia

Paradigm has an important in science. According to Kuhn, the paradigm is very influential on the steps and results of research. Because a paradigm is a pattern or framework of thinking adopted by scientists in conducting research. This article will explain Thomas Kuhn's paradigm and its relevance toward Islamic thought in Indonesia. This article is library research using a historical-philosophical approach. The historical-philosophical approach use to see the development of Islamic thought in Indonesia and analyze or find the relevance of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm concept toward the development of Islamic thought in Indonesia. The results show that the paradigm concept of Thomas Kuhn can be used in Islamic scholarship in Indonesia to produce Islamic thought that is relevant to current issues.

Science and Religion: A New Introduction, 3rd ed.

Science and Religion: A New Introduction, 3rd ed.

Anomalies of the control principle as part of the consolidated financial reporting concept

Subject. The article discusses the impact of the control principle on the existing consolidated financial reporting concept. Objectives. I evaluate possible alterations in the consolidation methodology as a result of the anomaly of the control principle. Methods. The study is based on the method of analogy for scientific hypothesizing. The study methodologically relies upon Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift theory and the impact of anomalies on methodological principles of normal science. The study combines the analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, and the method of comparison when analyzing the existing control criteria and identifying anomalies of the control principles as part of the consolidated financial reporting concept, and examining how the anomaly influences the consolidation methodology. Results. I discovered that the control principle in the consolidated financial reporting concept influences the consolidation methodology. I suggest using my own methodological approach to preparing consolidated financial statements in case of the non-equity control the parent company holds over its subsidiary. Conclusions and Relevance. The control principle in the consolidated financial reporting concept has not been formalized, thus causing anomalies affecting methodological principles of consolidated financial reporting. The non-equity control of the parent company over its subsidiary is a case in point. This control induces unavoidable changes in the consolidation methodology. The findings can be used to prepare consolidated financial statements in case of the non-equity control of the parent company over its subsidiary.

MAGMATOLOGICAL TECTONICS: ALFRED RITTMANN’S PARADIGM

ABSTRACT The aim of this research is to present the life and research of Alfred Rittmann (1893–1980). He was an Earth scientist in the broadest sense: a petrographer, mineralogist, magmatologist, tectonist, geodynamicist, planetologist, volcanologist and, what is more, a philosopher of geosciences. He is considered the founder of contemporary, volcanology by combining in his interdisciplinary research the study of volcanic phenomena at the surface with tectonic activity and magmatology. In his books, Rittmann discussed the first correlations between volcanism and tectonics; his geodynamic model comprises complex studies of geology, volcanology, magmatology and geodynamics. We propose to name his scientific worldview ‘Magmatological Tectonics’ (MT) and to describe it as a Kuhnian paradigm. The leading concept of all geological processes is the fundamental law. Rittmann also made abundant use of Chamberlin’s method, the method of multiple working hypotheses. Some brief interpretations will be proposed regarding the importance of Rittmann in the history of geosciences in the twentieth century and the emergence of some philosophical problems deriving from this research.

Bursting the Bubble - Rationality in a Seemingly Irrational Market

The presence of speculative bubbles in capital markets (an important area of interest in financial history) is widely accepted across many circles. Talk of them is pervasive in the media and especially in the popular financial press. Bubbles are thought to be found primarily in the stock market, which is our main interest, although bubbles are said to occur in other markets. Bubbles go hand in hand with the notion that markets can be irrational. The academic community has a great interest in bubbles, and it has produced scholarly literature that is voluminous. For some economists, doing bubble research is like joining the vanguard of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in economic thinking. Not so fast. If bubbles did exist, they would pose a serious challenge to neoclassical finance. Bubbles would contradict the ideas that markets are rational or work in an informationally efficient manner. That’s what makes the topic of bubbles interesting. This book reviews and evaluates the academic literature as well as some popular investment books on the possible existence of speculative bubbles in the stock market. The main question is whether there is convincing empirical evidence that bubbles exist. A second question is whether the theoretical concepts that have been advanced for bubbles make them plausible. The reader will discover that I am skeptical that bubbles actually exist. But I do not think I or anyone else will ever be able to conclusively prove that there has never been a bubble. From studying the literature and from reading history, I find that many famous purported bubbles reflect inaccurate history or mistakes in analysis or simply cannot be shown to have existed. In other instances, bubbles might have existed. But in each of those cases, there are credible rational explanations. And good evidence exists for the idea that even if bubbles do exist, they are not of great importance to understanding the stock market.

What I Learnt About How I Learnt About Behavioral Economists

This paper is a discussion of the role of the experimental methods and the dissemination practices of behavioral economists in capturing public imagination. The paper is framed by auto biographical accounts of two episodes in my own exploration of behavioral economics as a topic of study: participating in a MOOC on the basics of behavioral economics and sharing my work in progress to a group of staff and students in Singapore. Drawing on Shapin and Shaffer’s notion of “virtual witnesses” (Shapin and Shaffer 1985) I develop the argument that a consequence of the dissemination practices of the Heuristics and Biases Program is the creation of both “virtual subjects” and “virtual experimenters.” I then give an account of Thaler’s use of rationality and Kuhnian paradigm shifts as a rhetorical device to persuade mainstream economists and policy makers of the value of behavioral economics and to establish the narrative of behavioral economics as critics of neo-classical economics. I argue that the reflexive approach adds to accounts of the success of behavioral economics as a story of persuasive techniques of behavioral economists embedded in their practices of experimentation and dissemination.

정책사상의 이론적 기초로서 인간의 이해

정책(학)의 본질에 관한 철학적 사고를 정책이론으로 체계화하는 정책사상에서 인간의 이해는 아직까지 초보적인 수준이다. 따라서 비교적 짧은 정책학의 학문적 역사뿐만 아니라 행태과학 중심의 정책학이 발전되면서 정책사상과 그의 기초이론인 인간의 이해 등이 소홀히 취급된 것은 사실이다. 그러나 21세기에 오면서 정책사상에서 인간을 설명하는 연구들이 진행되기 시작했다. 이와 같은 하나의 연구로서 본 논문은 정책사상에서 인간을 정책인으로 이해하기 위해서 우선적으로 인간을 개념적으로 정의한 것부터 검토해 보았다. 그리고 인간을 이해하는 대표적인 인류학적 인간학에서 인간을 생물학적 인간과 철학적 인간으로 구분해서 설명하는 것을 비판적 입장에서 정리하였다. 마지막으로 인간과 비인간과의 상호관계에서 설명하는 인간의 이해의 논쟁도 찾아보았다. 이에 따라서 정책사상에서 정책인의 존재는 정책세계에서 중심자의 역할을 하면서 정책의 세계를 독점적으로 지배하고 운영하는 인간이지만, 만물의 영장으로서 사물을 착취하거나 지배하는 인간이 아니라 정책의 주재자로서 독점적으로 정책을 결정하고 실천하는 인간이라고 가정해 보았다. 동시에 독점적으로 정책을 지배하고 관리할 수 있는 수월적 정책능력을 소유하면서 정책대상자나 사물의 존재의 가치를 높이기 위해서 그들의 결정과 판단에 개입하고 간섭하는 정책인으로 그의 존재를 이해해 보았다.

Program Riset Ilmiah Imre Lakatos dan Analisisnya dalam Karya Tulis Mahasiswa IAIN Purwokerto (Studi atas Skripsi Mahasiswa Prodi SAA tahun 2019)

The study of scientific buildings will never be finished. Scholars are always offering the latest ideas to develop science. One of them is the Scientific Research Program initiated by Imre Lakatos.Departing from Popper's Falsification and Kuhn's Paradigm Shifting, Lakatos developed a new scientific direction; the Research Program. Lakatos' idea rests on three main aspects: a hard core, the protective belt and a series of theories. A sturdy protective belt will strengthen a hard core. Meanwhile, the protective belt is supported by a series of theories.Then, how is the application to real research? Especially for student thesis. This research is based on a literature review of the idea of Imre Lakatos, then apply it to student theses of IAIN Purwokerto (Religions Studies Concentration) and then give commensurate criticism. the conclusion, that the Imre Lakatos Scientific Research Program provides a new discourse on theories that were previously deemed a failure. Its failure is not the essence of the theory, but rather the weak supporting theory. As for the analysis related to the Student thesis, that there are still many deficiencies in the protective belt to establish a hard core of the topic.

Breast cancer and the black swan.

Most current research in cancer is attempting to find ways of preventing patients from dying after metastatic relapse. Driven by data and analysis, this project is an approach to solve the problem upstream, i.e., to prevent relapse.This project started with the unexpected observation of bimodal relapse patterns in breast and a number of other cancers. This was not explainable with the current cancer paradigm that has guided cancer therapy and early detection for many years. After much analysis using computer simulation and input from a number of medical specialties, we eventually came to the conclusion that the surgery to remove the primary tumour produced systemic inflammation for a week after surgery. This systemic inflammation apparently caused exits of cancer cells and micrometastases from dormant states and resulted in relapses in the first 3 years post-surgery.It was determined in a retrospective study that the common inexpensive perioperative non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) ketorolac could curtail the early relapse events after breast cancer surgery. A second retrospective study strongly confirmed this but an apparently underpowered prospective study showed no advantage.We are analysing these data and are now proposing to test the perioperative NSAID at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients, the category that could respond best to the perioperative NSAID. If this works as well as we expect, we would then transfer this technology to low- and/or middle-incomes countries (LMICs), starting with Nigeria where early onset type of TNBC is common. There is an unmet need in LMICs, especially in countries like Nigeria (190 million population), for a means to prevent surgery induced relapse that we are attempting to resolve.This work aims, thus, to describe eventual mechanisms, and ways to test a solution addressing an unmet need. But first, we consider the context, including within an historical perspective, important to explain how and why a Kuhnian paradigm shift may be considered.

Obvious and Improbable in Kuhnian Normal Science

The article is devoted to the analysis of some specific characteristics of the language of normal science described by Thomas Kuhn. We would like to draw attention to two problems associated with some features of the concept of paradigms. The first problem relates to the question, how scientists belonging to one paradigm record the position of a group of scientists adhering to another paradigm. Precisely, the article examines how the problem of “synchronous fragmentation of knowledge” is solved in the language of science. The second issue concerns the age of “normal” knowledge and the question, how the anomalous content of knowledge can appear and accumulate, and what is the status of scientists developing the “anomalous” knowledge. We reveal some possible parameters by which we can determine the early stage of the functioning of normal science, the periods of its heyday and decline. In this article, we try to find an approach to these problems by examining the natural language of scientists, using techniques of content analysis, as well as complex linguistic analysis, including discursive, semantic and pragmatic components. Linguistic analysis can’t finally solve the problems of philosophical analysis of scientific knowledge, in particular, the state of the paradigm concept by Thomas Kuhn. But it helps us to identify the boundaries of paradigms, as well as the state of normal knowledge. The problem of fragmentation of knowledge by paradigms, as well as the problem of “aging” of knowledge inside a “normal science” are not directly expressed by scientists. But they can be recorded by analysis of everyday language, which often becomes entangled with the language of science. The high rate of words that semantically indicate the “obvious” knowledge in scientific texts points to a “good” state of the paradigm. And vice versa, the words denoting “improbable” indirectly indicate its crisis state or express an attitude to the knowledge belonging to a different paradigm. The analysis of the data shows that the alleged complete replacement of Kuhn's concept of a paradigm by the concept of “trading zones” by Peter Galison does not appear to be accomplished. Just as the concept of scientific paradigm did not completely replace the falsificationalism, the Galison’s “trading zones” do not fully reflect the real state of affairs in science. Therefore, the Kuhnian paradigms are recorded at the lexical level in the communication of scientists.

Steamy

Steamy Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio) Let me begin with a blurb written by Rita Felski, author of The Limits of Critique, for Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, arguably post-critique's most successful venture: "This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett's eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the boundaries of political thought."1 If we survey what's happened in and around the humanities since 2010, when Bennett's book was published and new materialist post-critique debuted as the Terry Gross-style "fresh air" destined "to revive the humanities," we'd have to admit the obvious: rather than post-critique being the god that could save us now, the new paradigm that would sweep to dominance and make us relevant again, we've instead been vexed to nightmare by budget and tenure-line job cuts, disappearing students, and a number of self-inflicted Twitter wounds too numerous to elaborate. But I'm more interested here in the nomenclature of critical "steam"—insofar as, from its inception in Bruno Latour all the way to this journal issue, the steam metaphor is based on very recognizable marketing logic, or "next big thing" thinking: in short, the "Steam or No Steam?" gameshow format (as in, "affect studies—steam or no steam?") reinforces the sense that Kuhnian paradigm shifts (or less generously, neoliberal innovations in the product line) are the fuel for the engine of disciplinary progress, and more specifically that the entire academic enterprise is driven by steamy new scholarly publication protocols and their concomitant acronyms: ANT, OOO, various other OMGs, WTFs, and shiny innovative modes of adjectival reading (as in post-critical, distant, reparative, descriptive, surface, distracted, hyper, and so on). All this emphasis on critical "steam" (as newness or hotness) reinforces the sense that such heavyweight paradigm bouts are the central powering mechanisms of a discipline. So just let me say right out of the gate: from my point of view, it's not this or that theoretical paradigm that has run out of steam, but rather it's the very act of chasing the "next big thing" within critical paradigms that has run out of steam. Or it may be that, when it comes to thinking about theory and what makes it tick, chasing the next big idea was never anything other than a big ole Cleveland Steamer. [End Page 537] In any case, it seems clear that new materialism or post-critical realism is fashionable in theory today largely because its arch-nemesis social constructionism has run aground; there are just no new articles, books or dissertations to be written about the social construction of x or y. And to many jaundiced post-critical eyes, it looks like those social-construction years were tragically hubristic as well, with the tenets of the linguistic turn harboring a secret investment in what turns out to be an earth-destroying humanism. As Jane Bennett writes in "Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy," almost all of these recent post-critical models "share a critique of linguistic and social constructivism" and thereby "see the nonhuman turn as a response to an overconfidence about human power that was embedded in the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s" (Bennett 2015, 227). As an aside here, one might note that critique in the modern, Kantian sense is grounded in a severely austere humility concerning the power of human logos, not a celebration of its unbounded powers to know everything—the one point of agreement that made postmodernism and Kant such unlikely bedfellows. As Theodor Adorno insists, "The crucial feature of the Kantian work…is that it is guided by the conviction that reason is denied the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute. … The power of the Critique of Pure Reason resides not so much in responses to the so-called metaphysical questions as in its highly heroic and stoical refusal to respond to these questions in the first place" (Adorno 2001, 6-7). In fact, it completely escapes me how turning back toward realist metaphysical...

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Darwinian Pilgrim's Middle Progress

Part two of three in an autobiographical series which retraces the most significant events, collaborations, and research results of Michael Ruse’s 55-year-long career in the history and philosophy of science. In this article, Ruse’s first forays into philosophy are intertwined with his growing interest in the history of science. The main topics summarized in this second installment are considered thematically as they developed: “design” as a Kuhnian paradigm in the history of evolutionary biology (from the early 1970s onwards); the involvement in the McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education 1981 legal case which saw the rise of neo-creationism as organized pressure group; the exploration of the science-religion relationship (mid-1980s to 1990s); the problem of free will and the critical confrontation with the New Atheism (early 2000s); the question of accommodationism and the identification of “organism” as the root metaphor of evolutionary biology (2010s).

Trends in Contemporary Psychology

Based on V. E. Klochko’s transspective analysis, three interconnected trends in current psychology are explored: the shift from Kuhn paradigms, which do not play an instrumental role in psychology, to syntagmas; from the scientific method to applied technology; and from monocultural psychology to cross-cultural psychology.

Disruption as worldview change: A Kuhnian analysis of the digital music revolution

Why is it that technology-enabled industry disruptions appear entirely inevitable with hindsight, yet practitioners in disrupted businesses typically struggle to detect and respond appropriately to disruption while it is unfolding? We term this surprising contradiction ‘interpretive discontinuity’ and use it to problematize the established understanding of disruption in the literature. We suggest that the contradiction at the heart of interpretive discontinuity holds an important key to what exactly changes during disruption and why. By juxtaposing an empirical case of disruption in the music industry with theoretical resources sensitive to the nature of radical change – Thomas Kuhn’s work in the unrelated field of scientific practice – we demonstrate that it is productive to understand disruption as a Kuhnian paradigm shift. We are then able to trace interpretive discontinuity to the gestalt switch in worldview that accompanies such a paradigm shift. This insight sheds new light on both what is actually ‘disruptive’ about disruption and also on the limitations of prior work theorizing disruption. Our work is important because it adds to the literature on disruptive innovation important yet overlooked conceptual tools in Kuhn’s work – the role of exemplars, the worldview aspect of a paradigm, and paradigm incommensurability.

음운이론에 대한 재고 : 쿤의 과학혁명이론을 바탕으로

The goal of this study is to investigate leading linguistic theories using scientific revolutions of Thomas Kuhn. This paper discusses phonological theories including Neogrammarian, Structuralism, Generative Grammar, and Optimality Theory. Although the concept of Kuhnian paradigms can provide a satisfying account of earlier linguistic models, Generative Grammar may require a different perspective where Optimality Theory is sufficient to be a substitute paradigm for its predecessor in the sense that it can belong to Connectionist Theory originated in research on neural network. Optimality Theory also turns out to be a good scientific theory based on five characteristics Kuhn specifies in terms of theory choice: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. However, Kuhn fails to account for evident progress in science by failing to explain how two scientific theories with different viewpoints can come to an agreement on different matters. More recent work in philosophy of science treats science as an adaptive human activity. This position seeks to elucidate how scientists from diverse intellectual backgrounds cooperate to advance the state of human knowledge.

A Review of Psychology of Science

As an important part of the metascience, psychology of science serves a crucial sector of the science research from the perspective of humanities and social science. In the 1930s, psychology of science began to sprout, but in the following decades psychology of science was relatively silent, with few iconic achievements, and was rarely valued. Since the 1970s, due to the outstanding contributions of Kuhn's paradigm theory, psychology of science has been widely recognized. Since the mid-1980s, psychology of science research has gradually brought together researchers and produced a series of important achievements. The discipline of psychology of science has been formally established. In general, the subjects of psychology of science mainly include psychology of scientific creation, social psychology of science, and psychology of scientist personality. In China, Wang Jisheng made pioneering contributions in the study of psychology of science in the mid-1980s, but psychology of science had few achievements in 1990s to the 2010s, and the results are also mainly concentrated on the scientific image. Since 2013, the research of psychology of science in Chinese have gradually increased, the theoretical discussion of psychology of science has increased, and the exploration of the autonomy has begun to show. All in all, the development of psychology of science still needs more scholars to join, and needs the recognition and attention of the academic community.

Analysing the Role of World Bank as Knowledge Bank and its Implications

The World Bank (hereinafter, “WB”) has sought to explicitly position itself as a ‘Knowledge Bank’ of best practices within the field of development since the mid-1990s. This self-characterization as a neutral and altruistic authority on development research and practice evolved in response to, what is generally regarded as, a Kuhnian paradigm shift within the WB’s intellectual thrust and operational logic. Scholarly critiques of the WB have demonstrated, however, that this shift from the free-market endorsing Washington Consensus (“WC”) of the 1980s to the amorphous yet panoptic Post-Washington Consensus (“PWC”), has merely served to repackage and further entrench a neoliberal conception of development by incorporating within its ambit all aspects of social life. The WB is committed to the epistemological underpinnings of the discipline of economics and this frame of reference, predicated on an empirically unsubstantiated belief in the inherently self-interested and utility-maximizing nature of individuals, views the market as the medium through which development takes place, even when they do not work perfectly (Fine, 2009). This economic determinism has resulted in ill-conceived research studies, confident in their ability to statistically proffer pithy solutions, whose inconclusive findings have been upheld and disseminated as policy prescriptions, often as conditions for WB funding. Consequently, the WB’s contribution to the diffusion of the ‘homo economicus’, through its expansive research and policy reach, has transformed development praxis.

The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States by Sari Altschuler

Reviewed by: The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States by Sari Altschuler Stephen Rachman Sari Altschuler. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 312 pp. Ill. $55.00 (978–0–8122–4986–6). Only a few decades ago it would have been a truism to observe that medical practitioners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have been trained in the classics with a regular humanist education, that they demonstrated familiarity with Latin and Greek, read literature with avidity, sprinkled their medical discourse and their table talk with literary references, and even wrote poetry and fiction. Well into the era of the rise of medical science, Sir William Osler would regularly stud his lectures with allusions to his wide reading, and collections of his lectures were regularly given to freshly minted doctors as a kind of Hippocratic keepsake. Much has changed in our culture since these times, and among these changes has been a decline in the genuinely liberal arts education (which always meant arts and sciences) as a means to prepare a human being for virtually any kind of career, no less one in medicine. Despite regular calls and claims for interdisciplinarity in higher education and the growth and development of medical humanities programs in the training of doctors, a discursive divide has widened to the point that “medical humanities,” rather than a fusion of the arts and sciences, has come to stand for the extent to which the science of medicine has removed itself from the arts. Enter into this divide Sari Altschuler’s thoughtful contribution to the history of, if not exactly medicine, then the history of early U.S. medical culture. Altschuler argues that imagination was “fundamental to medical and scientific work” for [End Page 122] doctors of the early republic (p .9). Altschuler organizes her investigation around what she describes as “epistemic crises . . . a central precipitating event, such as an untreatable epidemic disease, a significant discovery, or a political crisis, unseats central ideas about the health of the human body” (p. 13). In the period covered in this study, the main focal points are the American Revolution and the coinciding foundations of chemistry, the outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera that struck with great force in the first half of the nineteenth-century, and the discover of anesthetics. These crises resemble Kuhnian paradigm shifts in the natural sciences, but Altschuler asserts that medical epistemic crises, “are both more pressing and more complex.” They differ from the Copernican example found in Thomas Kuhn’s classic study because the “social, cultural, religious and political imminence of crises in medicine is distinct from crises in the physical sciences” and that medical authority is subject to challenge from “lay practitioners to the clergy” (pp. 14–15). While one might wonder whether the trial of Galileo by the Church was any less complex than the challenges facing, say, Benjamin Rush or Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Altschuler’s study to its credit focuses on the complexity of the socio-cultural-medical nexus, in particular the imaginative strategies employed by physicians (she designates this “imaginative experimentation”) to address problems of medical knowledge. In this way, familiar topics for the history of medicine are given a fresh, imaginative slant. A discussion of the revolutionary era medical thought of Rush, Joseph Priestly, and Elihu Hubbard Smith dealing with phlogiston analyzes the fragmentary medical poetry of Samuel Latham Mitchill (“The Doctrine of Septon,” 1791) that reveals an allegory of oxidation within the body as form of republican representation. Mitchill postulated “septon” as a kind of master toxin, a nitrogenous agent that in decay was viewed by him as the root of all disease. “Emphasizing oxygen’s negative counterpart septon,” Altschuler explains this molecular politics, “Mitchill illustrated the need for representative forces that would act on oxygen’s behalf” (p. 45). In this way, the health of the body was related to the health of the republican body politic. Yellow fever is discussed, chiefly through Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, in terms of inoculation and concepts of social immunity. Other chapters focus on anesthesia and pain in the...

Evidence-based medicine as science.

Evidence-based medicine has claimed to be science on a number of occasions, but it is not clear that this status is deserved. Within the philosophy of science, four main theories about the nature of science are historically recognized: inductivism, falsificationism, Kuhnian paradigms, and research programmes. If evidence-based medicine is science, knowledge claims should be derived using a process that corresponds to one of these theories. This paper analyses whether this is the case. In the first section, different theories about the nature of science are introduced. In the second section, the claim that evidence-based medicine is science is reinterpreted as the claim that knowledge claims derived from randomized controlled trails and meta-analyses are science. In the third section, the knowledge claims valued within evidence-based medicine are considered from the perspective of inductivism, falsificationism, Kuhnian paradigms, and research programmes. In the final section, possible counter arguments are considered. It is argued that the knowledge claims valued by evidence-based medicine are not justified using inductivism, falsificationism, Kuhnian paradigms, or research programmes. If these are the main criteria for evaluating if something is science or not, evidence-based medicine does not meet these criteria.