Author Archives: Jesús Zamora Bonilla
Hume’s viagra or the new riddle of induction
DAVID HUME: You’re not going to believe me, Otto, but I have a new girlfriend.
OTTO NEURATH: Com’on, Dave, at your age, and within this crappy retirement home in which we’re confined.
HUME: Incredible or not, it’s a fact. She […]
What do we think? Scientific knowledge after judgment aggregation
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me, or we, who ‘really’ […]
What is reason for?
What does reason consist really in? What it is for? And why are humans, of all the millions of species having populated the earth, the only one that enjoys such a wonderful capacity? The French psychologist Hugo Mercier and anthropologist […]
Why we almost certainly do not live in a simulation ? (&2)
In the previous entry, I described Nick Bostrom’s argument for the ‘simulation hypothesis’, i.e., the conjecture that we are very, very likely living not in a ‘real’ world, but within some kind of computer simulation, and ended offering some […]
Why we almost certainly do not live in a simulation ? (1)
One important principle of any sensible social epistemology is that the fraction of crazy-sounding ideas that are really crazy is extremely high. Of course, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas have turned out being right (e.g., the evolution of different species […]
Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story
It is said that Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that convinced the ‘nearly medieval’ Europeans of his time of the sphericity […]
The rise and fall of the representational theory of measurement (and 3)
As we saw in the previous entries (1,2), the representational theory of measurement (RTM), mainly developed around the mid of the 20th century, was one of the main warhorses of the by then vigorous […]
The rise and fall of the representational theory of measurement (2)
In the previous entry we saw how the so called ‘Representational Theory of Measurement’ appeared to solve one of the deepest problems in the empiricist account of scientific knowledge: how to justify the use of numbers in science (and […]
The rise and fall of the representational theory of measurement
One of the most obvious differences between modern science and other kinds of knowledge, both present and past, is its massive use of mathematics, and in particular, its relying on calculations based on numerical formulae (for there can be mathematics […]
The not so secret life of plants (2): Vegetal perception
In the first entry of this series I introduced the new research field of ‘plant neurobiology’, one of whose main sites is the Murcia University ‘Minimal Intelligence Lab’ under the direction of cognitive scientist and philosopher Paco Calvo. In […]