epistemology, science, kinds of knowledge, methodology
Remodernism is a growing movement of artists and filmmakers who oppose post-modernism and its cynical and ironic attitudes and seek to renew the vision of early modernism, emphasizing the spiritual and expressive dimensions of art. See their manifesto here. What is interesting is the rejection of late modernism and its denouement in post-modernism. Something similar […]
It is not well known that there are two kinds of evolutionary theories, characterized by whether law or chance are the dominant means. For Darwinism chance is the dominant means, that is, stochastic elements are more significant than the processes of physical law. A different kind of evolution asserts that physical law is the dominant means
William Paley’s Natural Theology makes some important points: Whatever is done, God could have done, without the intervention of instruments or means: but it is in the construction of instruments, in the choice and adaptation of means, that a creative intelligence is seen. It is this which constitutes the order and beauty of the universe.
Parsimony is considered a desirable or even necessary characteristic of a scientific theory but what this means is not clear. There are many types of parsimony (see the article on Simplicity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a list). The most common kind of parsimony is qualitative parsimony, often called Ockham’s Razor, which says that
One way to express realism is that it insists on knowing what before knowing how. Why is that? Because for a realist metaphysics precedes epistemology, which means being precedes knowing. Something is, whether we know it or not. A question students are asked is, If a tree fell in the forest and no one knew
We begin with a non-empty, finite set of propositions that have already been accepted and compiled and now reside in a database of accepted propositions (DAP). Assume there is some known risk (possible zero) associated with accepting these propositions. Let the level of risk of the nth proposition Pn be a non-negative number, R(Pn), which
If someone from an isolated, technologically undeveloped culture sees an electronic gadget, they may think this took a long time to make. Does the gadget have apparent age? No, someone is merely ignorant of how it was made. Similarly, Adam and the original creation did not have apparent age. Some people may be ignorant of
Natural science is based on the premise that natural kinds exist, that is, types of entities with common, fixed characteristics called natures. The natural world is the combination and interaction of all natural kinds. Philosophically, this is a form of essentialism. Naturalism is the position that the natural world is all that natural science can
The book “Relational Mechanics and Implementation of Mach’s Principle with Weber’s Gravitational Force” (2014) is by Andre Koch Torres Assis. A bound copy is available through Amazon and a pdf is online at http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Relational-Mechanics-Mach-Weber.pdf. Recall “Mach’s Principle”: Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time were not accepted by all scientists and the call for a
The last few centuries have seen a number of theories of history which tried to make history a science and tried to articulate laws of history, including natural history. All of these have failed to find anything like a physical law. Natural history was treated as a science with “principles” substituting for fixed laws. The
