What is a scientific theory? In an abstract sense, a scientific theory is a group of statements about the world. For instance the Special Theory of Relativity has, “The speed of light in a vacuum is invariant,” as a core statement, among others, about the world. This statement is scientific because, in part, it is meant to hold in a ‘law-like’ fashion: it holds across time, space and observer. The Popperian view is that we […]
Tag: wittgenstein
For the Classy Wittgensteinian
Stylish Wine Filled Fly-Bottle
Wittgenstein and Sun Tzu (on throwing the ladder away)
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus #6.54 My Propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must overcome these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter XI #38 At the critical […]
Disrespect
If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II x Interesting that there is no significant first person present indicative of self disrespect. Consider, with Moore’s Paradox in mind: ‘I disrespect myself by sitting here, but I am doing it anyway.’ * * * * * Considering disrespect”s relation to Moore’s Paradox at issue here, it begs the question, ‘What is […]
Of Duckrabbits and Identity
Of late I’ve become increasingly concerned with the meaning of identity. When we say, ‘x = x,’ we don’t mean that the x on the left is exactly identical to the x on the right because the x on the left is just that, on the left, and the x on the right is on the right, not the left. Since equality would be useless without having 2 different objects (try to imagine the use […]
the lowest desires of modern people
… 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 […]
It was just a matter of time…
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Positive and Negative Biological Time
In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation. Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending […]