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”) […]
Yes, I talk to you, even more if you are one of those scientists working with any living being either unicellular or multicellular with sexual dimorphism seared in their chromosomes. Such a question may seem trivial. However, recent findings suggest that it is not so trifling, and that an affirmative answer could have major implications […]
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 […]
Author: Jaume Navarro received his PhD in history of science from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1998). He has been a researcher at the universities of Cambridge, Imperial College (London) and the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin). Currently he is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and a member of the Praxis Group at the Faculty […]
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 […]
Is the intelligence test an “objective”, scientific device or just a way to “execute” social discrimination? This article (based on ) presents the latest steps to trace the history of one of the most problematic chapters in psychology’s history: the application of intelligence testing. By informing about the history of the IQ debate I want […]