Why Is It Important To Be Considered Scientific?

Philosophy of science is a discipline whose one of the most important objectives, according to Ladyman (2002), is to provide the necessary tools and criteria to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.
The aim of the current paper is to provide an illustrative example of how the discipline can be used to determine whether some articles can be considered scientific. The two articles used in this report are concerned with two particular drugs and their connection to mental health and will be summarized succinctly. Furthermore, if the articles are deemed to be scientific, they will be evaluated on which paradigm they follow: a positivist or a constructivist. Lastly, they will be compared among themselves to illustrate the benefits of each

At the same time, it acts as an incentive to authorities to allow the drug to be more easily used in clinical practices, at least in the United Kingdom, for various psychotherapeutic treatments where studies have shown its effectiveness.
Next, each article will be assessed in terms of whether it can be considered scientific. According to Bortolotti (2013), scientific research follows some kind of methodology and impacts pre-existing knowledge in a domain, either by being novel or by being generalizable. There are two types of novelty, temporal novelty, in which ideas that seemed impossible are now able to be predicted, and novelty of interpretation, where old, known facts are “revisited and re-evaluated by the research program” (Bortolotti, 2013, p.

Constructivism exhibits the following set of attributes. It is participatory and collaborative and researchers are often working in conjunction with a study’s participants. The methods used are auditable, meaning that they are verifiable but difficult in reproduction, and dependable. The findings are usually qualitative, relying mainly on words rather than numbers. They are also either idiographic, in other words too unique to be generalized, or transferable, generalizable and can be used in other contexts. Nonetheless, the findings are always valuable since they aim in producing change and in contributing to pre-existing knowledge.
The article on MDMA focuses on empirical data and uses quantitative studies with statistically significant and reliable results that were also reproducible by subsequent studies by different researchers to support its claims. From this, it is evident that the current article follows a positivist