Andrews (2025) Summarizes the theory-free ideal, argues that it is not achieved, and that the best ML occurs when theory is embraced instead of attempting to minimize it. This also introduces the language of doctrine vs harmful meta-narrative.
Borrego (2007) in a study of a five day “Conducting Rigorous Research in Engineering Education” workshop for engineering faculty, researchers found that eningeering faculty found it difficult to grasp the concept of a theoretical framework in desiging educational studies. The authors attribute this to the fact that education research is a low consensus discipline where theoretical frameworks need to be explicit and defended, while engineering feilds tend to be high consensus and therefore rely on many implicit research decisions.
Barrett & Theriault (2025) summarizes philosphy of science views in psychology and how philosophy of science impacts the choices scientists make in practice. It breaks common philosophies in terms of their ontology (beliefs about the nature of reality) and epistemology (beliefs about knowledge) and how they relate to common theories in psychology. In particular, it advocates for scientists being aware of their own philosophy of science and explicates relational realism as a view.
Frank et al. (2024) introduces the blind spot of science: . They elevate an older complaint fomr Husserl in the 1920s-30s that western society, especially science, was “elevating mathematical abstractions as what is truly real and devaluing the world of immediate experience.” The surrepetitious substitution.
bifucation of nature
reductionism
objectivism
physicalism
reification of mathematical entitities
experience is epiphnomenal
- Andrews, M. (2025). The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning and the Theory-Free Ideal. Erkenn. 10.1007/s10670-025-01010-x
- Borrego, M. (2007). Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning Educational Research Methods. Journal of Engineering Education, 96(2), 91–102.
- Barrett, L. F., & Theriault, J. (2025). What’s Real? A Philosophy of Science for Social Psychology. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, & W. B. Mendes (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (6th ed.). Situational Press. https://openpublishing.princeton.edu/read/what-s-real-a-philosophy-of-science-for-social-psychology/section/ca34c35d-e211-427f-959e-59720e42571d
- Frank, A., Gleiser, M., & Thompson, E. (2024). The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. MIT Press.