Jesús Zamora holds PhDs in Philosophy (1993) and Economics (2001). Professor of Philosophy of Science and Director of the master's program on Science Communication and Journalism at UNED. Prolific author.
As we saw in my last entry, Karl Popper suggested around 1960 a way of formalising the idea that science can proceed towards the (full) truth through a series of theories or hypotheses all of which are literally false. Basically, his proposal was to define the relation of ‘theory A being at least as close […]
Probably, the most common assumption about scientific knowledge amongst the general public, and certainly amongst a substantial percentage of the philosophers of science, is that science attempts to find out the truth about the world (just like many other institutions or professions, like the courts, the police or whoever that needs to look for information […]
The idea of the countless “virtual worlds” that the metaverse will contain is, as we saw in our last entry, an extrapolation of the idea of “video game worlds,” not necessarily regarding their playful nature—since the metaverse is expected to be a place for almost any kind of activity, not just leisure—but in the sense […]
One of the things the media present these days as one of the most important technological advances for the near future is what has come to be called the metaverse . The metaverse could be characterized by two fundamental properties. First, what is now offered to us through more or less large two-dimensional screens (ranging […]
In my past entry I commented on the problems that Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science contains regarding her analysis of idealization. Now I will look at the question of truth. My main argument is that neither the widespread use of blatant falsities in science, nor the existence of other goals different from […]
Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science is probably one of the most interesting and ambitious philosophy of science books of the last years. It offers a picture of scientific knowledge and of its production that elaborates on, and wisely amends, some of the best literature in the recent ‘pragmatist’ tradition of philosophy of […]
I am these days reading the delightful (though at times quite demanding) Reviel Netz’s A New History of Greek Mathematics, and I have not resisted the temptation of sharing with you some of the many pearls it contains. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that it is not a mere ‘survey’ […]
I will close this series by commenting on the most conspicuous element of the contemporary debate about whether science points towards the existence of some kind of ‘cosmic purpose’: the possibility that the universe we observe is only a vanishingly small part of a mega-infinity of worlds – the multiverse, and more specifically, the inflationary […]
The most recent, and probably most imaginative of the significant contributions to the philosophical debate on whether contemporary science confirms, or at least points to some kind of strongly teleological cosmology, is Philip Goff’s book Why? The Purpose of the Universe . In this book’s arguments, the author builds both upon the ideas about cosmological […]
One of the most recurrent (and most disputed) headers during the last half century in the debates about whether cosmology points to some ‘fundamental purpose’ of the universe is (I didn’t need to say it) the (ill-)famous anthropic principle . Many versions of it have been formulated since it was so named in the 70’s […]