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
The Founders did “better than they knew” when writing the U.S. Constitution. They wisely separated the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. They also wisely made the legislature bicameral with an executive veto to make new laws difficult to enact. However, now that many, many laws have been passed, we can see that the difficulty in
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
Human beings certainly have a greater variation of behavior than other kinds of organisms but that should not obscure the existence of norms. The norm for human beings is monogamy: a marriage of one man and one woman. The existence of variations from that norm and failures to adhere to the norm do not invalidate the
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
There is a dualism between naïveté and skepticism. In ancient and medieval times there was a kind of skepticism about science. Zeno’s paradoxes for example questioned whether or not motion was real. Logic was refined to a high degree in the middle ages but was used for abstruse philosophical and theological matters rather than for practical knowledge.
