Philosophies of Funding

Abstract

Successful scientific practice encompasses broader and more varied modes of investigation than can be captured by focusing on hypothesis-driven research. We examine the emphases that major US and UK funding agencies place on particular modes of research practice and suggest that funding agency guidelines should be informed by a more dynamic and multidimensional account of scientific practice.

Looking proximally and distally: 100 years of limb regeneration and beyond

“…Granting agencies such as the NIH and NSF reject proposals that are not hypothesis-driven, and journals increasingly reject papers that editorial boards and referees feel do not test hypotheses about ''mechanism'' (O'Malley et al, 2009). Inductive reasoning from observations or experimentally derived data (''discovery science'') has almost come to be treated as unscientific.…”

Inductivism in Practice: Experiment in John Herschel’s Philosophy of Science

“…In this respect, there are connections that one could draw between Herschel's work and contemporary literature on exploratory experimentation. See, e.g., Burian (1997Burian ( , 2007, Steinle (1997Steinle ( , 2002aSteinle ( , 2002b, Franklin (2005), Elliott (2007), O'Malley (2007, 2011), Waters (2007, O'Malley et al (2009O'Malley et al ( , 2010. copper discs but also with discs of zinc, brass, and lead.…”

A conceptual paradigm of heart failure and systems biology approach

“…There are also two systems biology approaches or directions, the first composes metabolic and signaling pathways (bottom-up approach) and the second is attempting to decompose large and extensive biological networks into modules (top-down approach) (Table 1) [4,5]. The two directions are overlapping modes of practicing and thinking about systems biology [3,6]. Traditionally, evolutionary and molecular biologists examined organisms mainly with the bottom-up approach thinking that the functional parts of an organism would give an explanation of the whole living organism.…”