The Illusion of Knowledge: Why Modern Science Fails to Find Truth

2025 · doi:10.22541/au.173990727.70401064/v2
preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher

Abstract

Modern science excels at pattern recognition but frequently confuses statistical significance with truth. The precision-scope trade-off forces researchers into a dilemma: precise but impractical studies or broad but causally weak ones. As data scales exponentially, spurious correlations proliferate, exacerbating the reproducibility crisis. To restore credibility, science must move beyond statistical detection and adopt frameworks that prioritize coherence and causal structure.
Full text 1,469 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 2 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Modern science excels at pattern recognition but frequently confuses statistical significance with truth. The precision-scope trade-off forces researchers into a dilemma: precise but impractical studies or broad but causally weak ones. As data scales exponentially, spurious correlations proliferate, exacerbating the reproducibility crisis. To restore credibility, science must move beyond statistical detection and adopt frameworks that prioritize coherence and causal structure. Supplementary Material File (the illusion of knowledge.pdf) - Download - 147.53 KB Information & Authors Information Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Keywords

Authors Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 592views 174downloads Citations Download citation James Oliver. The Illusion of Knowledge: Why Modern Science Fails to Find Truth. Authorea. 28 February 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173990727.70401064/v2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173990727.70401064/v2 If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download. For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00