This is another attempt at understanding and articulating Kant’s philosophy of science ( Read more... )

Science has the goal of tracking the facts (distinguishing between true and false judgments of particular existences) like whether or not there is a tree in front of me (for our purposes, there is). In a Gettier case, such as when my judgment about the tree's existence is overdetermined as true because there is a hologram of a tree projected at the ( Read more... )

This post argues that reality is not a constitutive object of science, but rather a regulatory idea of science ( Read more... )

Hi guys, I'm afraid I'm not nearly as smart as all of you people in this community, so I need your help. I'm writing an essay on up to three films in which I have to analyze philosophies in them. I have decided to focus on trans-humanism and the movies I'll be focusing on are I, Robot, The Island and A.I. Artificial IntelligenceNow I just need help ( Read more... )

(As a regular lurker, and occasional commenter, I've noticed that the topic of Plato and/or Platonic philosophy comes up on occasion -- most recently in the form of a post by writingstudent. Given that, I thought it might be interesting to broaden the subject of discussion by posting an interpretation of a book written by a self-described, and recently-deceased ( Read more... )

Some philosophers of science have maintained that empirically equivalent theories are evidentially indistinguishable (EEEI). What this is taken to mean is that if two theories T and T' have the same class of observation statements, then our evidence is unable to support T over T' (and vice versa) and the evidence does not discriminate between ( Read more... )

In confirmation theory a problem for various confirmation measures has been what to do about "old evidence," that is, evidence which we are already certain about. To see why, simply observe that all (or at least nearly all) theories of confirmation require that Pr(H|E)>Pr(H) in order for evidence E to confirm hypothesis H (this should be done ( Read more... )

So a nice example of "the pessimistic induction" is from Larry Laudan's "A Confutation of Convergent Realism." Briefly, it claims that the history of science is a pretty sad story in terms of scientific theories getting it right about what exists (because most (all?) theories in the history of science are strictly false on subsequent theories) and ( Read more... )

Hurray. Everybody look at me, the physics troll is actually making a post.

( Substance Dualism and Conservation of Energy: They're Not Incompatible, Bitches. )

I just saw a show on a public access channel about existentialism, mainly about Jean-Paul Sartre. And I thought the following distinction might be a good starting point to illustrate my recent thoughts on philosophy, science, etc.: the universe as a realm of pure possibility (for instance, as described in Sartre's book Nausea), vs. the universe as ( Read more... )