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"Man finds himself in a perilous position…A far greater danger threatens [than the outbreak of a third world war]: the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then ...
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Without endorsing Dr Phillips' perspective — more because I find it presumptuous and arrogant than because I think he is factually wrong — the way to evaluate a scientific claim is on the preponderance of evidence. The 'preponderance of evidence' scheme implies the following:
The one makes the effort to incorporate all relevant observations as evidence for ...
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See Christian Wolff, Philosophia prima sive ontologia, § 884 and § 886.
See also : Kant Lexikon, Rudolph Eisler
The term " causality " as used in contemporary philosophy derives from Wolff through Kant.
Wollf calls " causatum" the relatum of a cause ( = that to which a cause is related, as a " cause of").
Not all " causatum" is an " effect" for there ...
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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 ...
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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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Judea Pearl's book on causality[1] was written precisely due to such type of issue, mainly to define a method to establish the causal relationship of a fact of perception with another (I think he says somewhere that people did not believe the causal link between vaccines and sickness, so he tried to formalize the process to establish causality with such book)...
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An interesting parallel here is with the debate on an earlier global climate problem. This was the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer and motivated an international consensus to limit and phase out their use. This was achieved within a relatively short time frame and without a great deal of controversy of about the scientific evidence.
Since the 'debate' on ...
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First, there was outright denial. People didn't believe the climate is changing. (Back then, climate change was commonly called "global warming," though that term was a little simplistic.)
As the evidence became ever more overwhelming, people were forced to admit that climate change is real. So they tried a different approach; they simply described it as a ...
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First, let me point out that the term 'pseudoscience' is badly misused in the modern world. Pseudoscience points at a particular activity: the attempt to portray something as a scientific result without actually engaging scientific methodologies, procedures, or reasonings. You can think of it as an effort to obtain the political/social authority of 'being ...
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What is technology ? (is it only material? aren't abstractions and cognitive processes also technologies in a way?) What about the importance of rationality in Western thought ? Can we think technology as separated of rationality?
See the idea of techno-capitalism for instance to grasp the moral universe (understand it as ethos) gravitating around the ...
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For Aristotle, all change is change of or in a substance. Substances are what ultimately exist and are the fundamental bearers or subjects of change. If a substance undergoes change in its essential, defining properties, in the sense that it loses those properties, then it ceases to exist as that substance. If a human being is essentially (definably) a ...
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