Naturalism, Demarcation, and the Structure of Scientific Knowledge: Four Studies in the Epistemology and Methodology of Science

This collection presents four studies in the epistemology and methodology of science, unified by a common analytical focus: the identification and critique of unfalsifiable presuppositions that operate as background commitments within contemporary scientific practice. The first paper, 'The Institutionalisation of Degenerative Research Programmes,' argues that three institutional mechanisms — the ad hoc hypothesis strategy, the circular validation of peer review, and the pre-emptive exclusion of alternative theories — share a common structural cause in the naturalist premise and systematically sustain degenerative research programmes against Lakatosian criteria for scientific progress. The second paper, 'The Epistemic Bankruptcy of the Naturalist Premise,' identifies four structural errors in naturalism as a scientific methodology: performative self-contradiction, the illegitimate transition from methodological to ontological naturalism, the self-neutralisation of falsifiability, and the problem of pre-material knowledge. The third paper, 'Radiometric Dating and Its Unfalsifiable Presuppositions,' applies the analytical framework of Papers I and II to geochronology, arguing that radiometric dating rests on three jointly unverifiable presuppositions and exhibits the characteristic structure of a degenerative research programme by Lakatos's three-condition test. The fourth paper, 'Demarcation without Naturalism,' argues that methodological naturalism constitutes a structural blind spot — a research constraint that cannot in principle discover causes falling outside the natural domain — and proposes a post-naturalist demarcation criterion based on independent testability, explanatory non-circularity, and predictive extension. Together, the four papers develop a sustained critique of the epistemological presuppositions of contemporary scientific practice and advance a positive proposal for a demarcation criterion that is not dependent on prior metaphysical commitment to naturalism.