RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Identifying models of a pragmatic theory of ecology
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 344200
DO 10.1101/344200
A1 Bruno Travassos-Britto
A1 Renata Pardini
A1 Charbel El-Hani
A1 Paulo Prado
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/14/344200.abstract
AB Ecology has suffered criticisms related to its theoretical development, in particular, that ecology does not have a unified explicit theory. However, the pragmatic view of science – a strand of the most commonly held view of science among philosophers of science (semantic view), assumes that the theory is an aspect of the activities of scientists and should not necessarily be explicit to guide the generation of knowledge. Under the pragmatic view, a theory is a family of models and the its formalization consists of the organization of these models and the principles guiding models’ conception. Here we present an analysis to identify which are the most relevant models within a domain of study and how these models are being referred as the conceptual basis of new models. We argue that a domain of study can be delimited around a community studying a specific class of phenomenon. The study of a class of phenomenon corresponds to the construction of models of the phenomenon that are based on previously proposed models. By accessing how the most referred models are cited in the literature, we are able to identify the most used models of the domain. The proposed analysis can be described as the following steps: (1) the definition of the domain of study, (2) the identification of scientific activities within the domain, (3) the identification of most relevant publications within the domain, (4) the identification of most relevant models within relevant publications. We also present the results of the first implementation of the proposed approach and discuss its technical implications and benefits. We conclude that the use of the proposed approach is effective in the process of organizing a pragmatic theory. The analysis has the potential to become a common tool shared by scientists interested in organizing models of different domains. That should connect more scientists around questions related to theory structure in ecology.