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Central question
When Berkeley roundly dismisses the existence of 'abstract' ideas and pronounces that 'to be is to be perceived', is he implying anything more than that the world is an illusion?
I don't think Berkeley believes or implies that 'the world is an illusion'. It is perfectly real - only it is not real as a material object, or set of material ...
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What is the value of a formal model in science?
To some extent, this question is the basis of the divide between realist and anti-realist positions in the philosophy of science, so it's a very broad question with a lot of metaphysical territory to cover; however, some gross oversimplifications follow:
First, from Mary Hesse, on page 300 of Blackwell's A ...
2
First a point that may or may not be clear: we care about the 'target system'; the model is in many ways incidental. The target system is some system or process that exists in the real world, outside (as Wittgenstein would put it) the limits of our language. We create models to capture elements of that system in language (including the language of ...
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Since the questioner mentions the Philosophy of Science, here is a response to 'What role does Philosophy play in the realm of Science?' Your creating models conundrum gives voice to the concern that science performed for its own sake, with no limits or guidelines is problematic. At the moment there does not appear to be any systematic, science based ...
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Suppose that M is a formal (mathematical) model and T is a target system. Then interpretation can be thought of as a map I:M->T. You can think of M and I as of "a picture" of T. The picture (as usual) can be to some degree accurate. Nevertheless its accuracy can be verified by comparing M via I with the target system T. Now suppose that you verified your ...
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Yes, axioms do exist. Underlying the processes of science are several philosophical assumptions--aka 'axioms' or 'first principles.' They are necessary for making any and all inferences from scientific data, and really, even for the application and method of science itself. We take them for granted--like most philosophy--and don't think about them much. They ...
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Who made the last conscious choice to act, knowing the likely outcome of his/her action? Does Charlie reasonably believe that his bullets will continue to miss Bob because he doesn't know about Alice? Does he know that someone might possibly block the safe path without him seeing it, and is therefore acting with reckless disregard for Bob's life? Did ...
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I would say a categorisation is always made from a point-of-view. In the end all things belong in the category 'everything' and how we divide them up after this is up to us. It all depends which features and properties of the object matter to us. Some we ignore, some we use as the basis of categorisation.
This would not mean that categories are arbitrary,...
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Apparently, there is a text by Popper on TV.
The french translation is " La lélévision, un danger pour la démocratie".
I cannot find the original reference in english.
Also, Boudieu ( a sociologist with a philosophical academic background) :
https://monoskop.org/images/1/13/Bourdieu_Pierre_On_Television.pdf
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