… Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. This quote is from the beginning of Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” or whatever the […]
Category: science
Time and the Limits of Science
Measurement takes time; measurement is a process. So the measurement of time immediately yields this theoretical issue: Since measurement takes time, our ability to break time into ever smaller pieces will always be proportional to the method of measurement used. The faster our measurement device that measures time, the more divisible time will be. Insofar as there are limits to how fast a measurement process can occur (relativistic or other), there will be limits on […]
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 […]
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 […]
something about time
There is something about time that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. We measure time by agreeing upon an event and then counting from that point onward. Today is October 17, 2008 AD. It is this AD that keeps my attention. It has been 2008 years, ten months and seventeen days since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth: AD stands for Anno Domini, or year of our lord. Those not wanting to be explicitly […]
Consciousness Dilemma, take 2
Back in January I wrote up a post on what I believe to be a major problem in the study of consciousness. Now, with the introduction of Consciousness Online (started by the estimable R. Brown), I feel my dilemma should get some renewed attention. Here’s the argument: Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind is. If someone knows something, then it is part of his or her consciousness. If someone knows what consciousness is, then his or […]
Where Does Probability Come From? (and randomness to boot)
I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability. What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns: a measure of how likely it […]