Kinds of Science

Abstract

This chapter reviews distinctions between kinds of science, which is especially relevant to the book’s topic because it is an area that Karl Popper did not consider in detail. This creates a problem since critics of the hypothesis often do not distinguish between true hypothesis-based science and other kinds that don’t depend on hypotheses, and the traditional divisions of science miss the main points. The chapter distinguishes among several modern kinds of science including Big Science/Small Science and how they relate to Big Data and Little Data, and why Discovery Science is different from hypothesis-testing science. It separates “exploratory” from “confirmatory” studies and explains why this terminology can create confusion in trying to understand science. The differences between applied and basic science are genuine and meaningful because these two kinds of science have different goals and apply different, though overlapping, standards to achieve their goals.