Philosophical justification and critique of science.
This post continues thoughts about design, last posted here. Here is a description of how cement is made from the Portland Cement Association: In its simplest form, concrete is a mixture of paste and aggregates, or rocks. The paste, composed of portland cement and water, coats the surface of the fine (small) and coarse (larger) […]
There are many different musical temperaments that have been used to tune musical instruments over the centuries. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. But there is one musical temperament that is optimally acceptable: the equal temperament method in which the frequency interval between every pair of adjacent notes has the same ratio. This produces
This continues the posts here and here and here based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Philosophy in the Flesh (Basic Books, 1999). The Location Event-Structure Metaphor Locations → States Movements → Changes Forces → Causes Forced Movement → Causation Self-propelled Movements → Actions Destinations → Purposes Paths (to destinations) → Means Impediments to
This post continues other posts (see here and here) on the relevance of Aristotle’s four causal factors. Call the higher causes the final and formal causes, and the lower causes the efficient (mechanistic) and material causes. Aristotle argued that the upper causes are more important. Early scientists argued that we couldn’t know them regarding nature
This continues a previous post on Occam’s razor, which it was pointed out is a principle that is arbitrary and biased. With what should it be replaced? Every science has at least two schools of thought. These reflect well-known tendencies to ascribe more significance to one of two contrary explanatory factors. For example, there are
I previously wrote about pluralism here. Science is usually considered monist in various ways: there is one scientific truth, one scientific reality, one scientific method. This leads to having one scientific theory for each subject, if at all possible. The single scientific method is the easiest to critique: each branch of science has its own
In 1738 David Hume wrote of the “principle that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk I, pt iii, sec 6). In 1748 he wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: When we have long enough to become accustomed to the uniformity of nature, we acquire a
I wrote before here about the book Laws of Form. I’ve written recently about conceptual induction here. This post connects the two. In the book Laws of Form, Appendix 2, G. Spencer-Brown interprets the calculus of indication for logic and finds a problem when it is interpreted existentially. To avoid this problem he introduces “Interpretive
John P. McCaskey has done a lot of research (including a PhD dissertation) on the meaning of induction since ancient times. He keeps some of his material online at http://www.johnmccaskey.com/. A good summary is Induction Without the Uniformity Principle. McCaskey traced the origin of the principle of the uniformity of nature (PUN) to Richard Whately
A uniformity principle says, What is true of some is true of all. This is usually applied to nature: What is true of some of nature is true of all of nature. Or, What happened in one experiment will happen if the experiment is repeated by anyone else. Since J.S. Mill this principle of the
