abstract:Formal sciences are disciplines concerned with formal systems, such as logic, mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, information theory, game theory, systems theory, decision theory, and portions of linguistics.
Prof Christy makes the distinction - crucial to scientists - between draft papers for discussion and final, complete ones that go into academic journals and become part of the formal literature of science.
Motivated by my own experience of the civil service tendency to hold things close to the chest, one of the first things I did after becoming chief scientific adviser was to set out formal guidelines for handling science advice in policy making.