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It may be a misnomer to say rationalism was created to oppose empiricism, but I see what you are getting at.
All rationalism claims, is that some knowledge about the world comes a priori - either innate or by thought alone. This doesn't say all knowledge has to come from thought. So, it is kind of agnostic about the scientific method here.
Descartes tried ...
8
First off, rationalism predates empiricism. Rationalism is arguably the normative mode of philosophical enquiry all the way back into prehistory; clearly (for instance) most of ancient Greek philosophy falls closer to the rationalist camp than the empiricist. Empiricism was a late Western technique developed to deal with some of the failings and foibles of ...
4
Rationality is essentially human logic plus empirical facts. Science is essentially a systematic and rigorous application of human rationality. The scientific method is therefore rational. Thus, rationality precedes science but science is designed to perform better.
There are several important empirical facts concerning rationality. First, it is possible to ...
4
First, let's define faith. What makes faith different from mere trust ? An effective definition is "belief in something without, or even in spite of, the evidence".
Boarding a plane trusting it will not crash is not faith, because thousands of planes take of everyday and don't crash. Sitting on a chair trusting it won't break is not faith, because ...
3
Short Answer
In his paper, Chalmers answers you directly himself, p.10:
We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we ...
3
Peirce introduces objective and subjective possibilities in the context of describing gamma graphs, an extension of his diagrammatic proof system (existential graphs that are expressively equivalent to the usual predicate calculus) to modal logic. "Subjective" means what we today call epistemic (possibility), while the earlier accounts of modal ...
2
A "concrete" example from everyday life would be the statement, "Mary is my friend."
Compare to other ways I could describe her:
"Mary is a person. I have met and spent time with Mary over a long
period of time and have good feelings toward her and I believe she has
good feelings toward me as well."
"Mary is a mammal. She ...
2
The Wikipedia page states (emphasis mine):
The philosopher David Chalmers, who introduced the term "hard problem of consciousness,"[3] contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information [...].
It seems to me what you describe would ...
2
No, at least not given those assumptions. Given a set of facts, if we have several sets of hypotheses that each explains the facts, then there is no theoretical means to decide which set of hypotheses is true, if any, and which is false.
However, it is always possible, at least in principle, to falsify the hypotheses that are false by uncovering, or ...
2
Quasicrystals seem to be a good example, even if that might need some technical details.
In a nutshell: crystals were defined as materials producing sharp diffraction spots; it was thought that translational symmetry does the trick. However sharp diffraction spots arranged in a fivefold pattern were discovered and this type of symmetry does not allow for ...
2
Q: What exactly is referred to by the "hard problem".
A: The hard problem of consciousness, according to Chalmers and the majority of philosophers that use this term, is the problem of how and why there is conscious experience occurring in a physical process. (1-5) Again, let’s examine Chalmers’ frequently quoted words:
“The hard problem, as I ...
2
The philosophy in which falsifiability, or its close relative verifiablilty, is the criterion for meaning is known as logical positivism. It was all the rage in the mid-twentieth century.
The verification principle states that no statement has any meaning unless it is, at least in principle, verifiable.
The problem is that the verification principle is ...
2
There is a fissure between the supposed objectivity of relativity, ‘requiring no observer’ and the more widely accepted subjectivity of more than one interpretation of quantum mechanics,(and indeed everything else we think about.)
To the believers in the objectivity of relativity, I would say: that’s a subjective opinion - which you’re entitled to.
There is ...
1
In the physics world, such an event is called unification. Here are some examples:
Maxwell's equations unified all the various experimentally-derived laws of electromagnetics into one set of four equations that concisely expressed all that was known in that field, and in the process allowed the speed of light to be calculated, and the laws of optics and ...
1
This question is interesting, because it points up the fact that a scientific theory can experience a reduction in its scope and explanatory power without being rejected as completely wrong. In addition to the answer given by sand1, here are some other examples that might fit the bill.
Dalton's theory of atomism. According to Dalton, all matter is composed ...
1
Answer
I'm no specialist, but I'll give it a stab. First, you might be interested in SEP: Measurement in Science. Some other possible resources that you can follow up with are SEP: Experiment in Biology, PhilPapers: Experimental Philosophy of Science, and Blackwell's Companion to the Philosophy of Science. I have an older edition, but the article Experiment ...
1
Short Answer
Abstraction is useful anytime you want to reduce your 'volume' of information. For instance, you can have a set and write out all evens from 2 to 100 or write out "2n∈[2,100]_ℕ"? They both would represent the set of even natural numbers from 2 to 100, but the latter uses an abstraction.
Long Answer
To drive home the short answer above, ...
1
Various benefits can be envisionned :
(1) removing accidents and grasping essential properties
(2) forming general concepts and being able to formulate general or universal truths; as says Aristotle " science is about what is universal"
(3) analysing a representation in order to consider separately its component elements
(4) saving intellectual ...
1
The mind/body problem comes to mind. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p7hKimR4_lJS8cRWNUaEVgT0Dig9QZV1UWy_X2Kbneo/)
Ideas like material abstractions biology, chemistry, anthropology operate on the physical side, abstractions like personality, psychology, will exist on the spiritual side. All patterns are a set of attributes and boundary conditions ...
1
I guess it to some extent reduces to where these entities are thought to be "located."
Qualia-like sense data are generally considered to be located In ones mind, in that they are "the alleged mind-dependent objects that we are directly aware of in perception, and that have exactly the properties they appear to have." (See SEP).
Whereas ...
1
If even a single one of the implications of a theory is empirically testable, then the theory is scientific. Testing that one implication would amount to doing a scientific experiment.
That being said, the word "empirically testable" means that there must be another theory that predicts a different outcome for that experiment. Then doing the ...
1
Just warning you, this is a math heavy proof. Lets start by defining some terms:
N = number of tests preformed
P(S) = probability of a result happening if S was true
S1: The program does not have a bug.
S2: R = (number of inputs the give a correct result)/(number of all possible inputs) = 1
S3: r = (number of inputs the give a correct result)/(number of ...
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