This continues the posts here and here based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Philosophy in the Flesh (Basic Books, 1999). Modern metaphors begin with René Descartes. Knowing is seeing: Visual Domain → Knowledge Domain Object Seen → Idea Seeing an Object Clearly → Knowing an Idea Person Who Sees → Person Who Knows […]
Direct democracy is an idealized concept in which the people vote on all political matters. Besides being impractical, it assumes the people have sufficient time and information to consider every matter. Such a continuous democracy would be like the weekly polls published by the news media, except they would result in real decisions – and
The value of an independent variable may be selected first, and so is arbitrary, even subjective. One may select anything or everything within its range. A graph normally covers a whole range of the independent variable. Given an independent time interval, different travel rates result in different travel distances or, the other way around, different
The low end of the news business makes little or no attempt to separate news and opinion. The better news outlets attempt to separate news and opinion, but are failing. What are the reasons for this? Let’s take it that news reports ought to consist of factual information about the world, rather than opinion. Granted
Space is measured from a specified point, which is called an origin or zero point in space. The spatial location of all other points in space are relative to this zero point. The zero point may represent “here” from which other locations near and far are measured. Or the zero point may be a beginning
A school of thought is an approach to a discipline by a group of people, especially one that develops its own vocabulary and intellectual tradition. There are many schools of thought in the humanities and soft sciences, including historical sciences. There are fewer schools of thought in the hard sciences, but they exist there, too
Clocks can easily be placed on moving bodies or observers to measure travel time continuously. A moving body can have on-board devices to measure cumulative travel distance. Observers have more difficulty measuring the cumulative travel distance of an external body but it can be done by motion tracking devices. If the distance is long, multiple
This post follows the previous one on circular motion. A timeline shows a linear representation of time (click to enlarge): A calendar can be linear, too: Linear calendars and clocks could be thought of as representing a kind of distance. It’s as if a clock were fastened to a wheel moving along a line. The
Consider two circular motions, one a wheel and the other a clock (click for animations): The wheel is the target motion to be measured. The clock is the reference motion, which maintains a constant angular velocity.
This post follows others written about Occam’s razor here and here and here. The flaw of Occam’s razor has been identified: the parsimony it privileges is biased against qualitative explanations and in favor of quantitative explanations. Here’s a simple example: “the hypothesis that the damage to my lawn was caused by 12 rabbits is less
