In my past entry I described the tribe of the ‘Halflings’ as those authors who try to find a middle road between the ‘Platonist’ that identify beauty as one essential goal of scientific research (even conflating it, in the end, with truth itself), and the ‘Sceptics’ that assume that aesthetic criteria are essentially subjective and […]
One traditional question in the philosophy of science, or perhaps it would be better to say in the philosophical views about science, is the role that aesthetic judgments and emotions play in the evaluation of theories, models, hypotheses, or experiments. We can classify the main positions about this question in roughly three groups. In the […]
One last aspect in which Dembski’s use of the ideas of information and probability are confusing is the fact that it seems to ignore what is an inescapable consequence of a theory ( T ) being an explanation of certain phenomena or empirical laws ( E ). Since a necessary requisite for T to explain […]
After having shown the ways in which Richard Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (EF) in support of the ‘intelligent design theory’ (ID) misconceives and misapplies the nature of scientific explanation, I shall devote the last entries of this series to discuss another mistake in Dembski’s work: the way in which he employs the ‘no free lunch’ theorems […]
If in the two previous entries of this series we have seen that (contrarily to what Dembski’s filter suggests and needs) ‘law’ and ‘hazard’ are not different types of explanations, but necessary and complementary elements of basically all explanatory models, I will try to show here that ‘explanation from purpose’ is not as significantly different […]
Besides confusing what a scientific explanation is, as we saw in the previous entry , Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (‘anything must be explained by law, by chance, or by design’) also commits the worst mistake that can be committed while using the logical rule known as ‘disjunctive syllogism’ (“either p or q; not p; ergo q”) […]
The most notorious argument presented in favour of the theory that asserts that living beings are necessarily the result of a conscious and deliberate act of intelligent creation, is William Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (EF). According to this argument, when explaining anything, we have three alternatives: first, we shall try to explain it as the result […]
In the last decades, the most popular philosophical defence of scientific realism has been what is known as the ‘no miracle argument’ (NMA; Putnam 1981). Though there is a range of different interpretations of NMA, it typically asserts that scientific realism is ‘the best explanation’ (or perhaps, the only reasonable one) of the ‘success of […]
That prediction is one of the main goals of science goes without saying, but how exactly predictive success contributes to the epistemic value of a scientific theory has proven to be an awfully complicated philosophical riddle for centuries. By ‘epistemic value’ I don’t mean something for which we can offer a formal definition (this is […]
[You can read the first part of the manifesto here, and the second here] (5) In this last entry we will consider three main objections that have been levied against positivism in various of its brands: the epistemological objection that science –and human knowledge in general– cannot be reduced to a combination of a neutral […]