In the editorial of Transactions 9 (1) April 2012 I asked how we are training students to judge good from bad knowledge and raised the idea of refutation as a method of scientific discovery and progress. There are different approaches to creating a body of generalizable knowledge. Precedent case studies are a good start. Medical researchers and practitioners make use of online repositories of case histories which they use to observe patterns identify instances of drug interaction effects drug side effects unusual outcomes from multiple pathologies and so on. Urban designers like architects like to use precedents as a source of ideas in solving a design problem. The process can be thought of as analogous to the philosophical method of refutation.
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