Renaissance superstitions presented people with a confusing mix of enlightened insight into science, plus beliefs in the supernatural and pagan influences beyond one’s control. All publications are classified into six categories on the basis of their long-term citation characteristics (Table 2). This classification operates according to two criteria: whether a publication is selected by one of the algorithms and the total number of citations it has received from both review papers and patents since the publication until 2016.
Reichenbach maintains that philosophy of science includes a description of knowledge as it really is. Descriptive philosophy of science reconstructs scientists’ thinking processes in such a way that logical analysis can be performed on them, and it thus prepares the ground for the evaluation of these thoughts (Reichenbach 1938: § 1). Discovery, by contrast, is the object of empirical—psychological, sociological—study.
The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of The English Language (Encyclopedic edition), …