Israeli nurseries are particularly famous amongst economists (at least, amongst experimental economists). An already classical study shown that, following a ‘natural experiment’ in which some day-care centers opted for issuing a fine to parents for late children’s pickups, while other nurseries didn’t, not only helped to decrease (as expected) the frequency of late pickups, but […]
Another route that has been followed to apply economic thinking to scientific methodology has consisted into trying to define a specific (‘cognitive’, or ‘epistemic’) utility function which rational scientific research should maximise. This has been the strategy of what is usually called cognitive decision theory , which is basically an adaptation of the Bayesian theory […]
The first known application of modern economic techniques to solving epistemic problems in science was very explicit in describing the value of a scientific theory as the difference between ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’. I’m referring to Charles Sanders Peirce’s ‘Note of the Theory of the Economy of Research’, published in 1879, less than a decade after […]
The term ‘economics of scientific knowledge’ (ESK) was coined as a reaction to the field known from the seventies as ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’. The latter had been defined by the members of the so called ‘Strong Programme’ in contraposition to the classical notion of a ‘sociology of science’, having in mind a distinction between […]
There is only one concept more important in (traditional) metaphysics than the concept of truth: the concept of being, existence, or reality. If we can interpret Aristotle as being the first deflationist philosopher about truth (when he asserts in his Metaphysics , IX, that “it is true to say of what is that is, and […]
We saw in the second entry of this series that predicates like “…is true” have the following linguistic function: applied to an expression that designates a sentence X, they render a new (pro)sentence (“X is true”) that expresses exactly the same as the first proposition. This has lead some philosophers (not a majority, really) to […]
We saw at the end of the first entry of this series that, in spite of the adjective ‘true’ seeming to be semantically redundant in the sense of its role being equivalent to just assert exactly the same assertion to which it is applied, it is nevertheless grammatically non-redundant, in the sense that there are […]
Truth has been, and still is, one of the most important topics in the history of philosophical thought. How to get truth from falsity, how to approach the truth, or the connection between truth, wisdom and the sense of life, all that has been the object of never-ending debates which anyone familiar with philosophy will […]
We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]
In the last entries of our series on the origins of Islam we shall explore some of the information contained in or directly connected to the Qur’an itself. As I explained in the previous article, the Holy Qur’an is the only important Arabic written document from the VIIth century. Even stone inscriptions in Arabic are […]