Category: philosophy
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Empirical Stance vs. Absolute Rationalism
My comments: http://www.facebook.com/groups/321291954641287/permalink/321519644618518/ ————————- Craig, thanks for the invitation. Well, I have recently read The Empirical Stance (The Terry Lectures Series) by van Fraassen: http://www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/CatalogueCopy.htm I guess, that I prefer the empirical stance right now. Remember that the other name for rationalism is dogmatism. ————————- Frank, dogmatism concerns rationalism vs. empiricism. That is, the question…
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DNA to represent proteins
Recently I have read Bas C van Fraassen Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective where a representation is defined as p. 21 “Z uses X to depict Y as F” Does it make sense to say “Z uses” when Z is not a human being? For example, what is a meaning of a sentence “a robot…
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Weyl on mathematics vs. reality
From Bas C van Fraassen Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective p. 208 “Herman Weyl expressed the fundamental insight as follows in 1934: ‘A science can never determine its subject-matter expect up to isomorphic representation. The idea of isomorphism indicates the self-understood, insurmountable barrier of knowledge. […T]oward the “nature” of its objects science maintains complete indifference.’…
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Rainbow as Public Hallucinations
From Bas C van Fraassen Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective p. 102-103 “Consider the rainbow. We realize pretty soon that there is no real material shining arch standing above the earth, although at first it looks that way. As a second guess we might think that certain parts of the clouds or haze are colored. But…
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Self-ascription and “Perfect Model Model”
From Bas C van Fraassen Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective p. 45 “Agreed, we cannot demonstrate that in principle, as a matter of logic, mathematical modeling must inevitably be a distortion of what is modeled, although models actually constructed cannot have perfection reachable in principle. But on the other hand, the conviction that perfect modeling…
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Evolution and German Idealism
Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion “In all these tales, the overall direction of the universe’s unfolding is unmistakable: as if following some second law of religious thermodynamics, the spiritual universe is running down. In the actual unfolding of the universe’s history, we humans (and all creatures) were once…
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On Mathematical Modeling
Bas C van Fraassen Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective p. 40 ‘Of course the story is apocryphal, that a professional gambler funded a mathematician to analyze horse-racing, and was thoroughly unhappy with the report that began “Let each horse be a perfect sphere, rolling along a Euclidean straight line …”. But is that so far…
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Representation Of, Representation As
I have started reading Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective by Bas C van Fraassen and I have just finished the first chapter, Representation Of, Representation As. Here there is a discussion what we mean by representation in a normal language. The author defends that a representation is p. 21 “Z uses X to depict Y…