Category
Science & Technology
How science works, what physics and biology tell us, and where technology is taking us.
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Health cannot be defined without values, and Boorse’s statistical theory shows it by trying
Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory is the most serious attempt to define health without any value judgements. Roughly: health is the absence of disease, and a disease is an internal state that reduces some function below what is statistically typical for your reference…
Started by Dima Nasser3 replies -
Introspection is too unreliable to ground a science of consciousness
Early experimental psychology relied on trained introspection, in the laboratories of Wundt and Titchener. It collapsed partly because labs couldn't agree: the "imageless thought" controversy couldn't be settled, because one lab's trained observers reported imageless thought and another's didn't. More recently, Nisbett…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Falsifiability is not a good criterion for what counts as science
Karl Popper, in Logik der Forschung (1934; English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), proposed that a theory is scientific if and only if it's falsifiable: it makes predictions that could turn out false. As a physics teacher I used to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha6 replies -
A model can work for decades without being true, and instrumentalism is the honest response
In my work we tune computer models of reservoirs to match years of production data, a process called history matching, and then use them to forecast. Here's the uncomfortable part: several quite different models of the rock underground match the same history…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
Genes carry information only in Shannon’s sense; the rest is metaphor
In biology, people talk about information constantly. Genes "encode" proteins, DNA is a "blueprint" or a "program", development "reads out" the genome. My thesis is that only one of those uses is literal, and it is the least interesting one. In Shannon's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
A correlation explains nothing until someone shows the mechanism
Our data say that people who charge their phones at regular times are more likely to repay small loans. The effect is real, stable and useful for prediction. But when a manager says this explains repayment, I object. It explains nothing. Perhaps…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga6 replies -
Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
I dive in kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through biology, so I will defend the view that feels most like home. The puzzle: a frog's tongue fires at small dark moving dots. Usually they are flies,…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism
I dive in the kelp forests along the Chilean coast. In the years I have been diving there, the species boundaries in some kelp groups have been argued over and redrawn on the basis of genetic data, and biologists still disagree about…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
Special relativity has refuted presentism, whatever presentists say
I'd like to argue the strong version, then see how much survives. Presentism says only the present exists. Past dinosaurs and future grandchildren are not real; only what is happening now is. That requires a fact about which events are happening now,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Cartwright is right: the fundamental laws of physics are false of real things, and that’s fine
No oil reservoir has ever behaved exactly as my equations say. Every model is an idealisation: uniform permeability, simplified boundary conditions, ignored chemistry. We calibrate, we fudge, we history-match. And yet the models are useful. Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Saving a theory with an auxiliary hypothesis is often exactly the right move
In 2011 a neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso reported particles arriving slightly faster than light. If you took naive falsificationism literally, special relativity was refuted that afternoon. Nobody I know believed it. The collaboration itself asked for scrutiny, and the anomaly was…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
I work alongside physicists, and I have never met an objective one. I include myself. We all have pet ideas, we read data in their favour, we are slow to give up an interpretation we have published. And yet I believe physics…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Calling al-Jahiz a forerunner of Darwin does him no favours
Every few months someone sends me a graphic headed "Evolution, 1,000 years before Darwin", with a portrait of al-Jahiz (c. 776–869) that nobody painted from life. I work on classical Arabic texts, and I want to argue that the "forerunner" label shrinks…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Being a realist about electrons commits me to nothing about moral or mathematical facts
I'm a scientific realist in the ordinary way: I think electrons, quantum fields and the like really exist, and that our best theories are approximately true of them. People sometimes assume this makes me a realist about everything else too. It doesn't,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest
Many-worlds has a reputation as the science-fiction interpretation. I want to argue it is the opposite: the reading that adds least to the physics. Look at what the others add. Copenhagen-style views add a collapse whenever a "measurement" happens, without saying what…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn
My physics students in Lagos always ask the same thing when we reach the history of astronomy: if a single failed prediction refutes a theory, why did astronomers keep Newton when Uranus misbehaved? Popper's falsificationism seems to say they shouldn't have. Kuhn's…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha5 replies