New answers tagged philosophy-of-science
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Any argument against determinism?
Two more cents.
An, sometimes unappreciated, argument against determinism is based on our direct introspective experience of freedom as related to acknowledging multiple potential courses of action (...
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What is the difference between a Belief and Truth
It’s a classic epistemology question.
Truth is a true state that exists objectively. When something is truth ，it must be true.
Belief is a proposition which we believe subjectively.This proposition ...
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What is the difference between a Belief and Truth
Objectively speaking, there is no truth, only belief and meaning.
What is true? Do statements like "the shortest straight-line distance between two points" count? You can use a lot of ...
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
Personal Note:
One of the things I've learnt in many decades of teaching is that when a student says: I am bored... or even I dont understand anything! it usually means You (the teacher) are effing up....
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
I want to point one area which is central to philosophy and likely will remain central.
It is the study of self-reference in all possible contexts. Self-reference leads to multiple paradoxes in logic, ...
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
I think the importance of Philosophy (or philosophical thinking) is more important now than ever. Lest I sound like the fangirl that I am, let me justify this :)
True to Philosophy, even its ...
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Accepted
Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
The answer to your first question is debated. There is a broad
spectrum of yes - no answers with the corresponding argumentation.
E.g., the comment of @gs to a previous question states
Philosophy is ...
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
Philosophy is "the pursuit of knowledge". That is never antiquated, or irrelevant.
IN the pursuit of knowledge, philosophers have developed some theories about useful ways to gain knowledge....
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
Absolutely not. Wittgenstein said in the 'Tractatus' that philosophy is either above or below science, they are not at the same level.
I don't want to be accused of spreading 'conspiracy ...
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
Lots of confusion arises from the fact that the word "philosophy" has been used for a long time to encompass all research of knowledge, including what is now called philosophy in schools and ...
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Is Philosophy decaying into an antiquated subject?
No. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. It can tell you why many things are the way they are, but it can't tell you the way things should be - that depends on our goals, values, ethics, ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
There are many absolute truths:
There are no round squares.
There are no square circles.
All bachelors are unmarried.
Knowledge of these absolute truths has not had a profound influence on my life.
In ...
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Can natural decreasing temperatures in the world create energy to power it?
Super duper question. I recall reading how water that seeps into rocks through natural pores & cracks can break them when the temperature drops to/below freezing. My answer would be that the ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
There's an old Buddhist parable that applies here:
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
Grasping absolute truth (the Western analog of ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
If we attain absolute knowledge, then it will change our belief system, it will affect how we interact with each other. For many people absolute knowledge has already been achieved. For example- ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
The answer is: You are a human. You cannot gain absolute truth. You would go insane, or your head would explode.
Something created this world....
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What is more important: simplicity or induction?
Descartes and Solipsism
Solipsism follows inexorably from Descartes. A simple reductio ad absurdum (or contrapositive or modus tollens) suffices to get us out of that mess.
i.e.
If
Cartesianism ⇒ ...
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What is more important: simplicity or induction?
We could differentiate metaphysical simplicity from explanatory simplicity.
Metaphysical simplicity is what you're talking about: the number of entities existing in reality. This has issues: shouldn't ...
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What is more important: simplicity or induction?
Occam's razor is the central principle of induction.
Theoretically, we seek the simplest explanation - in terms of the shortest and simplest formulas - that exactly matches and predicts all of the ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
99% is a huge over-estimate. 1% would be a huge over-estimate. Heat death involves guessing about the state of the universe in 10^106 years. This requires assuming that the guesses we have about the ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
You ask:
Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
Well, you are starting your philosophical career in the right place, among philosophers, so Philosophy StackExchange is a good ...
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Where do we go if we gain knowledge of the absolute truth?
Unfortunately you do not tell us what you consider the characteristics of “the absolute truth”. Hence I answer your question under the assumption
to consider an absolute truth to be a proposition ...
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4
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
Freeman Dyson explored the heat death of the universe in "infinite in all Directions": https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-All-Directions-Lectures-April-November/dp/0060728892 In chapter 6, he ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
There is the Boltzmann brain thought experiment which suggests that if eternal inflation (and some other physical theories) are correct then we are almost certainly brains that spontaneously formed in ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
I would suggest taking a look at absurdism and the works of Albert Camus. While, as far as I remember, Camus does not address directly the heat death of the universe, his whole theory of Absurdism ...
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Revival of Logical Positivism?
I have seen no indication of an effort to revive logical positivism.
What I HAVE seen, is that "hard-headed" materialists who are relatively new to philosophy, are strongly attracted to its ...
- 14.6k
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Revival of Logical Positivism?
A lot here depends on what you mean by "logical positivism." If you mean something like Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic or Carnap's Aufbau, then no, those projects hit dead ends decades ...
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If there is no more gap, is the existence of God the logical conclusion?
The "God of the Gaps" theory is primarily an Atheist, possibly strawman, argument against Theistic arguments, and not necessarily an actual Theistic argument directly.
The belief in God does ...
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What is evidence?
I originally thought that it was a when an argument against a theory or hypotheses was proven false, then that would be evidence for the theory or hypothesis but I haven't found anything supporting ...
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Accepted
Emergent Behavior: Observer-Constructed or Observer-Independent behavior of systems
You ask:
Are there theoretical perspectives that support this observer-centric interpretation of emergent phenomena? If so, which authors should I research to learn more?
Undoubtedly yes. In ...
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Emergent Behavior: Observer-Constructed or Observer-Independent behavior of systems
This answer will be a criticism of your premise rather than references endorsing it.
When you state:
The emergent behaviors claimed to be observed in certain phenomena are not inherent to the ...
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Are the concepts of reductionism and first principles the same?
No.
Foundationalism is a philosophical theory, which addresses the nature of knowledge, which would be built upon a set of foundational (basic) truths(*). The opposite of Foundationalism is ...
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Are the concepts of reductionism and first principles the same?
The first principles approach is the same as deducing all knowledge claims from axioms which cannot be derived from more fundamental axioms. This is the same as what we have called axiomatic inquiry, ...
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Emergent Behavior: Observer-Constructed or Observer-Independent behavior of systems
The emergent behaviors claimed to be observed in certain phenomena are not inherent to the phenomena themselves but are artifacts of the mental representations and interpretations of researchers, who ...
- 7,727
2
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Emergent Behavior: Observer-Constructed or Observer-Independent behavior of systems
The emergent behaviors claimed to be observed in certain phenomena are not inherent to the phenomena themselves but are artifacts of the mental representations and interpretations of researchers, who ...
- 14.7k
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Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language
It took a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, to propose an expanding universe in 1927. Einstein in 1915 had added a term to his General Relativity equations to produce the steady-state ...
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Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language
The question of the beginning or no-beginning of the universe is not a “misunderstanding of applied language”.
The issue is more serious: Currently we lack the concepts to think about this question. ...
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Is Decision making based on the measured outcome the only way a single elementary particle can make future uncertain in large macroscopic scale?
Are you asking whether the macroscopic significance of microscopic events is only relevant if we measure them AND take that measurement as deciding effect?
Well no. There are plenty of quantum ...
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Any argument against determinism?
I think that one powerful argument against determinism is that it implies no human free will; and the logical implications of this are not practically livable.
For example, with no human free will, ...
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Any argument against determinism?
Another two cents.
Another kind of argument against (strict) determinism is a transcendental argument (that can be traced in some sense back to Kant) which, under various guises, has been used many ...
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6
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Why do many philosophers consider a past-eternal universe to be self-explanatory but not a universe that began with no cause?
It may help to look at this in the broader sweep of history. The Big Bang is a relatively recent development in cosmology. The concept begins to appear in the early 20th century, but didn't really ...
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Why do many philosophers consider a past-eternal universe to be self-explanatory but not a universe that began with no cause?
Can something come from nothing? If so... what is it... that supposedly came from nothing?
What I mean by that is...
What fundamentally exists, now, today?
Fundamentally what is reality made of?
...
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causality and locality in universe
In Newton's theory of gravity, changes in the distribution of mass in one location change the gravitational field everywhere in space so that theory is causal but not local.
I should note that some of ...
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Mechanistic view of the universe
What encourages a mechanistic view...
I've already argued in a comment that a mechanistic model attempts to answer a "how" question, e.g. how does the observed motion of the planets arise? ...
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causality and locality in universe
Causality and locality are closely intertwined but in the quantum description of the world , causality and locality do not always go hand in hand. For example , in quantum entanglement , quantum field ...
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causality and locality in universe
... continuing the thoughts from the previous discussion ...
In a local system, causality is to be understood - in respect to time - as a flow of a cause and an effect. But if a system is non-local ie....
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What principle protects the objective nature of the prior and the conclusion in Bayes’s theorem?
I suspect that you are confusing Bayes's Theorem with Bayesian inference. As @Marco Osram pointed out, Bayes's Theorem is an actual theorem, with a proof. Frequentists don't question Bayes's Theorem; ...
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Mechanistic view of the universe
An additional (perhaps minor) point: Maxwell himself spent his later years hypothesizing various mechanistic models for electromagnetic wave propagation in which space was filled with submicroscopic ...
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What principle protects the objective nature of the prior and the conclusion in Bayes’s theorem?
A mathematical theorem that can be proved to hold true inside a mathematical context, becomes part of the theory itself. In that case you can see it as tool; what you do with that tool, is up to you. ...
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What principle protects the objective nature of the prior and the conclusion in Bayes’s theorem?
Short answer
NO! What Bayes' Theorem does, is allow one to do statistical analysis of what happens to one's prior belief, given new data.
To do that, one must specify one's prior, and its relative ...
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