Tourist Mobility and Destination Competitiveness .
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Twenty-five centuries ago Pythagoras stated that science has to lead observed diversity to unity, and Protagoras attributed to measurement the task of qualifying all contemporary science. Hume, heir to the new science where empiricism and quantitative methods mingle, enhanced observation and measurement as the only processes able to lead diversity to unity. Nowadays, it is commonly accepted (in Feyerabend’s terms) that, as Poincare pointed out, science consists of the relationship between facts, and statistics is not an exception. Statistics yet, moving from rationalism to empiricism, does not always attribute the meaning of revealed truth to its summaries; on the contrary it acknowledges they may have a conventional value and are considered able to “indicate” missing information on objects through available ones. Indicators are consequently used in place of indicated objects, even though the “strong” cause-and-effect relationships are replaced with simple associations. Multi-causality is at the root of the large amount of simple and composite indicators that computer technology allows to arrange and manage, so that they seem able to give proper answers to our research issues. In doing so, multicausality is supported by the linearity principle according to which the more is the better and if linearity is lost on observations, it is retrieved by means of operational tricks or, what’s worse, it is ignored so as to generate elegant but obliterating explanatory and forecast models.
Language: Italian
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2276052595