ABSTRACT
Most scientists used to work alone or in small groups led by a senior scientist. However, there’s a growing trend toward collaboration between researchers in many different locations. Globalization, aided by the advent of the Internet and rapid advances in communication technology, seems to have spawned greater collaboration over longer distances. Knowledge becomes a much fuzzier concept in Immanuel Kant’s world. If there are clear limits to what we can know, then our ability to reach identical conclusions under similar conditions should not be taken for granted. Deduction is reasoning from the general to the particular. A perfectly logical deduction yields a conclusion that must be true provided that its premises are true. Thus deduction involves specifying a set of axioms and proving consequences that can be derived from those premises. Social scientists have become quite fond of the game, seeing Prisoner’s Dilemma situations arising everywhere in socioeconomic interactions. It’s a surprisingly ubiquitous metaphor.
