Value in Formal Theory Land | 4 gravitons
What makes a physics theory valuable? You may think that a theory’s job is to describe reality, to be true. If that’s the goal, we have a whole toolbox of ways to assess its value. We c…| 4 gravitons
How much can you trust general relativity? On the one hand, you can read through a lovely Wikipedia article full of tests, explaining just how far and how precisely scientists have pushed their knowledge of space and time. On the other hand, you can trust GPS satellites. As many of you may know, GPS wouldn’t […]| 4 gravitons
What makes a physics theory valuable? You may think that a theory’s job is to describe reality, to be true. If that’s the goal, we have a whole toolbox of ways to assess its value. We c…| 4 gravitons
Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. This is one of the key insights of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science initiated in the 1970s (link, link), and it underlies much work within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. But what more specifically goes into the “denkkollectiv” (Ludwik Fleck), “research programme” (Imre Lakatos), or “disciplinary m...| Understanding Society
While many medical advances such as vaccines, analgesics, and dialysis have involved animal research, the practice is controversial for a simple reason: we experiment on animals because they are like us, yet this likeness may imply that we’re wrong to use them. This essay discusses the ethics of animal research, by considering three common defenses of it and some responses. The post Ethics and Animal Research first appeared on 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology.| 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier. David Edmonds' biography of Parfit provides a careful and detailed account of Parfit's main philosophical preoccupations and some details about his life in Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Popper's autobiographical essay in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl PopperPart I and Part II (published separately as An Unended Quest) offers ...| Understanding Society
This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute. Without philosophical thought, Einstein claimed he “would have contributed nothing to science.” And yet, modern science popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson dismiss philosophy as largely irrelevant to scientific inquiry. In…| Blog of the APA
One of the most frequently encountered objections to Christianity is that modern science has rendered belief in God intellectually untenable, along with many other central tenets of the Christian faith. This is closely related to what has been dubbed the “conflict thesis”: the idea that there is a deep and ultimately irresolvable conflict between science […]| Analogical Thoughts
This blogpost is a| A Myth in Creation
The dialogue continues! Responding to Richard Gipps's post contra aftab contra gipps contra seth| A Myth in Creation
“without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery,| A Myth in Creation
Recently I've been thinking about Reformation, the 16th century Christian movement in Europe led by Luther. As commonly understood, this movement "posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in particular to papal authority, arising from what was perceived to be errors, abuses, and discrepancies by the Catholic Church" (wikipedia).| A Myth in Creation
In a recent interview with Zhixian Lian from the Chinese Social Sciences Today (CSST), I was asked a number of questions about the value of exploratory research. You can find my answers below—the interview is also available online and was translated to Chinese. After a brief brief summary of exploratory and confirmatory research, it leads... Read more » The post The crucial value of exploratory research appeared first on Eiko Fried.| Eiko Fried
David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This seemed to be a book that had a lot going for it. The topic of 'the science of certainty' appealed to a reader like me who is fascinated...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
We who have nothing to “wind string around” are lost in the wilderness. But those who deny this need are “burning our playhouse down.” If you put quotes around certain words it sounds more like a m…| SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD
Abstract New Public Management (NPM) can be classified within the naturalist philosophy of science. I introduce naturalist philosophers that laid out the framework for NPM including Bacon, Galileo…| Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
An introduction to the philosophy of pain: is pain physical or mental? What is the role of the pain system? And, is pain always unpleasant? These questions are the focus of this essay.| An introduction to the philosophy of pain: is pain physical or mental? What i...
In his 1951 paper on the “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, W.V.O Quine introduced the Web of Belief as a metaphor for his holistic epistemology of scientific knowledge. With this metaphor, Quine aimed to give an alternative to the reductive atomising epistemology of the logical empiricists. For Quine, no “fact” is an island and no experiment […]| Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
This week I was in Turku, Finland for the annual congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. I presented in the symposium on mathematical models in evolutionary biology organized by Guy Cooper, Matishalin Patel, Tom Scott, and Asher Leeks. It was a fun. It was also a big challenge given the short ten minute […]| Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
One of the most interesting ongoing problems in metascience right now is the replication crisis. This a methodological crisis around the difficulty of reproducing or replicating past studies. If we cannot repeat or recreate the results of a previous study then it casts doubt on if those ‘results’ were real or just artefacts of flawed […]| Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
A couple of days ago, Maylin and I went to pick blackberries along some trails near our house. We spent a number of hours doing it and eventually I turned all those berries into one half-litre jar of jam. On the way to the blackberry trails, we passed a perfectly fine Waitrose — a supermarket […]| Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
I’m becoming convinced that many disputes in the philosophy of science are merely manufactured, arising from people interpreting words to mean different things. A good example is the concept …| coelsblog
I’ve been thinking a lot about the human tendency to categorize lately and the ways in which our methods of categorizing the world affect our ability to draw accurate maps of it, especially a…| Cody Moser's Culturologies
This is a submission to the Effective Altruism Criticism Contest. It was originally posted here.| The Chaostician
Foreward When I first entered graduate school four years ago with the intent of studying the evolution of tarsiers, I had a lot of ideas about evolution. During my first week, and even during first…| Cody Moser's Culturologies
