It is said of philosophers that they are ever less willing to recognise a mistake than the ordinary intellect… sorry, man on the street. Actually, an old joke tells about a university rector saying to other that his favourite department is that of mathematics, for mathematicians only ask for paper, pencils and paper bins; “oh […]
In previous posts, we have discussed the two main loopholes of Bell experiments, the locality loophole, and the detection loophole. Both were closed a long time ago, but only recently they were closed in the same experiment. Let us summarize the kind of experiments we are dealing with by an example. Alice and Bob will […]
PONTIUS PILATE And what about you? Do you find it…risible, when I say the name…Biggus… Dickus? (Monty Python’s Life of Brian) The human being is not the only animal that laughs, but very likely is the only one that laughs at something. Having the capacity for humour and finding it pleasurable is also one of […]
Though I’m making a break in the brief story of skepticism I have been telling in my past entries, we will not lose contact with our friends the demons; if in that story we were talking about the most philosophical one of them ( Descartes’ Evil Demon ), this time our initial protagonist is another […]
As you can imagine from the reading of the previous entries, it was by no means an easy task to transform skepticism into a weapon against religious belief. This does not entail that criticisms of religion tout court had failed to exist before, say, the late Modern Age. Not to mention again our adorable Greeks […]
If you have been following this series, I guess you will by now have learned a few surprising details about the history of western thought. For example, the fact that Ancient skeptics considered that it was suspension of belief , rather than the search for certainty , what most plausibly could lead us to happiness […]
For quite a while now, it has been assumed that Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) have improved the way we acquire knowledge, especially in the scientific area where this technique is the gold standard, clinical practice. From Medicine to Social sciences, evidence-based policies have turned into the widespread common ground from where to seek trustworthy information […]
Descartes’ opening of the Pandora’s box of skepticism, and the liberation of the Evil Demon it triggered, started a terrible shock in the tectonic plates of Western thought, a shock whose waves still reach us with more or less strength, and that mainly contributed to configure our contemporary intellectual landscape. I shall devote the next […]
Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]
Some decades ago, the American social scientist Donald T. Campbell imagined interdisciplinary research as a fish-scale structure according to which scholars should make an effort to create links between disciplines, spanning areas ignored by others, in an overlapping pattern aiming to cover the entire web of knowledge. He suggested that scholars should overcome the “ […]