New answers tagged philosophy-of-science
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I can see how the saying, "correlation is not causation," might make you think that causation is not mathematical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Correlation is not causation, but statistics encompasses more than mere correlation.
Judea Pearl's approach to causation is a successful one, and I'd recommend checking out his book.
In ...
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Ernst Mach until his death in 1916 completely denied atoms existed, as indicated by Boltzman's theories & confirmed by Einstein. Because he believed in continuous substances, and waves, as fundamental. We should be as wary of a bias toward thinking everything is made of lumps, as the converse. We don't have to make up our minds except on the basis of ...
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OK SpaceKidd_N7, let me try to explain this for you.
Some of the world's most eminent physicists have indeed spent their entire careers figuring out how it is possible for space to bend, when at the same time it demonstrably does not consist of matter. The problem here is not that no one has thought about this, but that you don't know that they have. Your ...
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So I think first of all that you're right to identify Quine as committed to saying something important about how the practice of science relates to our sense of "what there is" in the world. While from his earliest writing Quine was already talking about semantic holism, that our unit of interpretation in empirical hypothesis testing involves the ...
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Well, yes, exactly so, we can believe that our best scientific theories "tell us what exists".
And then again, these theories may well turn out to be completely wrong.
So this does not mean that "science determines our ontology"?
Well, yes, it does if you want to!
An ontology is "the set of entities presupposed by a theory", so ...
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Doesn't assuming there will be a universal model of universals, presuppose the answer? I'd say Godel's Incompleteness Theorems mean there will always be new areas of knowledge, with new methods, and the language game of 'universals' will change and extend. There can be no final vocabulary.
I'd say universals, such as those found in mathematics, come from ...
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I've long believed that mathematics is "the art of formalizing the processes of intellection."
Its uses in science and philosophy arise, not because maths describes reality, but because it allows one to formalize ones thoughts and deductions about it in such a way as to permit allegorical parallels and algorithmic manipulations.
As Einstein put it: ...
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The main difference between Modern Science-(i.e. "The Scientific Revolution") and its predecessors, has to do with the accessibility and availability of mechanical instrumentation and more sophisticated forms of scientific experimentation.
While it is certainly true that Hellenistic era Inventors, such as Archimedes, did advance scientific ...
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I would find it difficult to believe that Nicolas Copernicus-(The Father of MODERN Astronomy, circa, the 1500's AD/CE), would NOT KNOW about his predecessors, in particular, his distant Ancient Greek Predecessors, such as Archimedes and especially, Aristarchus of Samos-(the earliest known Heliocentric Astronomer).
Copernicus lived a good part of his adult ...
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The Kuhn Debt of Computer Science
The Turing Award is considered like a Nobel prize in Computer science.
The 1979 Turing Award went to Robert Floyd.
The title of his lecture was Paradigms of Programming.
In case the Kuhn debt is in any doubt, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific revolutions is in Floyd's bibliography.
Paradigms in CS today
Admittedly, the word ...
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Are there examples of this kind of fieldwork where the scientists are
actually approached and interviewed about their belives and practices
(like is done in examining so-called primitive tribes)? And doing so
refute the theories put forth by the philosophers of science?
Certainly, there are sociologies of scientific knowledge (SSK) programs, such as David ...
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Allow me to work from analogy... The United States has 350+ million citizens. If you were to were ask them individually what the USA is, or how the USA works, or what it means to be a US citizen, you would get a good half-million different answers, which you could probably organize into a few hundred different 'camps', of which maybe two or three dozen ...
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Your professor is right: The objects of study of physics and mathematics are completely different. Physics seeks to understand the universe, the reality we perceive, and because of this uses the scientific method. Mathematics, on the other hand, seeks to understand mathematical structures, and the method it uses to establish its truths is logical reasoning. ...
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What I believe your professor meant by saying "physics describes our universe while mathematics describes any potential universe" is that mathematics always studies a more general case of anything while physics just studies a special case of that anything. Your professor probably wanted you to focus on the word " any" rather than ...
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One can believe in what Ayn Rand says and not have an issue with QM. Reality can exist out there, independent of us and all the things she believed in. The key is to realise we organise our sense data from that world using models we subconsciously and consciously construct. Now QM is a model basically about observations. Ayn Rand believed the world ...
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According to dictionary.com, art is:
the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
Science is usually viewed (to some degree) as “of more than ordinary significance”, and since it is expressed (through findings, observations, data, etc), it can be an ...
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I would certainly agree that its practice is an art, as follows.
Its products generate aesthetic pleasure in other practitioners and even in non-practitioners (like me) whose brains are similarly wired. So ordinary people who do not play musical instruments or sing and act can nonetheless be moved by witnessing an opera performance, in the same way that we ...
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I see art as 'high craft', such that it extends or somehow transforms what can be done in the medium. So yes. But only sometimes, in the case of exceptional examples, or practicioners.
Discussion on what art is here: Video games as new art I would look to art as a kind of play: a creativity with what creativity is.
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It depends on what you mean by "idea". It sounds like by "idea" you mean something similar to what contemporary philosophers mean by "proposition" (something that has a truth value and can be the object of belief).
It's very widely accepted that there are infinitely many propositions. For example, for all natural numbers n, one ...
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