Category archives: Philosophy of science

On theory and observation (3): Scientists selling lemons, a game-theoretic analysis of how scientific facts are constructed

On theory and observation (3): Scientists selling lemons, a game-theoretic analysis of how scientific facts are constructed

Philosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

In our trip through the philosophical discussion about the nature of observation in science, I propose to take a different route from the most classical ones, and probably a surprising one for most of you. Akerlof’s classic paper ‘The Market for Lemons’, one of the founding works of the Economics of Information, presented an idealised […]

On theory and observation (1):  The theoretician’s dilemma

On theory and observation (1): The theoretician’s dilemma

Philosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Contemporary philosophy of science was, at least during its first decades (those of the glorious Vienna Circle), a kingdom of radically empiricist and positivist intellectuals: scientific knowledge had to be obtained and tested mainly through experiment, and everything that could not be robustly grounded on experimental observations was just dangerous speculation and metaphysics. The connections […]