Category: philosophy

phil sci interwebs goings on

Although I seriously doubt anyone who reads this blog for philosophy of science doesn’t yet know about It’s Only a Theory, if this does apply to you, go check it out. It bills itself as “A Group Blog Devoted to General Philosophy of Science”. Along the same lines Bryan over at Soul Physics has listed some of the few places to find philosophy of science on the net.  Yours truly was pleasantly surprised to make […]

Argument Structure

Basic argument structure goes like this: Premise 1 Premise 2 ———————– Conclusion Knowing how to argue is great, except when someone you disagree with is proving things you don’t like.  In that case you have to know how to break your opponent’s argument or provide an argument that they cannot break. First thing that most people do to break an argument is to attack premises (assuming no fallacies are present).  To avoid accepting your opponent’s […]

Deriving Philosophy of Science

Two posts ago I claimed that The goal of science is, therefore, to separate the settled from the anomalous. So what is the settled?  What is the anomalous?  How are they separated? If we take these concepts to be fundamental then we are unable to analyze the concepts of settled, anomalous and separation scientifically: if they are at the bottom of all science, then everything within science depends upon them. How then to understand? At […]

Counter Structural Realism

I’m starting to think that ‘structural’ in ‘structural realism‘ is vacuous. Before getting to the meaning of structural we have to know what we mean by real.  In this instance we are specifically concerned with science so what we are looking for is the goal of science, i.e. what is scientifically real.  This is a meta-scientific question, and the best I can do here is to quote what Darwin quoted at the start of the […]

Truth is… and other short thoughts

Truth is whatever you are willing to wager your sanity on.  This works because sanity is relative to people, so if you are willing to wager your sanity on something, so should other people. Deontology has a problem because no one can definitively tell you what it is to follow a rule.  So deontologists can’t fault others for appealing to unexplained concepts without undermining their own argument. Whereas the meanings of particular words may be […]

Economics

Readers of this blog may have noticed a lack of updates recently. I can’t apologize: I’ve been eating, breathing and drinking philosophy for so long, that now that I have written everything I wanted to write, I feel free.  I wish it on all of you. [Happy New Year Everyone!] But this doesn’t stop me from thinking.  I was at a Christmas party  and got talking with an Indonesian economics grad student.  He was researching […]

Game Over

Yesterday was very strange. Last Friday I finished up my metaphysics and promptly went on a short vacation to see some friends. I got home Tuesday night. Then came yesterday. It was the first whole day in which I had to really spend time worrying about what to do now that I have written everything I ever wanted to. The proper term for what happened was I flipped out.

A note on ethics: Mutual Enrichment

Our ethical responsibility is to do our best to enrich the lives of others and to give others the opportunity to enrich us. Everyone understands what it is to have an enriched life: everyone has had a friend, learned something of worth, or made the world a better place at some point (even by accident).  Moreover, once you understand how your life has been enriched, then you understand how you could act in a similar […]

K*nt F*cker

I was at a bar on Friday.  One of my friends says, “Hey Noah, there’s another philosopher here, come talk.”  So I go and chat. She wrote a MA thesis on Levinas.  But somehow we got to ethics.  I started making fun of virtue ethics, which she believed in.  Something about me saying she had tomatoes being cultivated in her head got her riled up.  Since I had said I was unimpressed with Singer earlier, […]