In science, for a phenomenon to be reliable, it needs to be validated by a certain statistical value, the p-value, which by giving an estimate of the probability that the result would be the product of chance, serves as a measure of the probability that a certain event happening is true. So far, the convention […]
DAVID HUME: You’re not going to believe me, Otto, but I have a new girlfriend. OTTO NEURATH: Com’on, Dave, at your age, and within this crappy retirement home in which we’re confined. HUME: Incredible or not, it’s a fact. She is a German existentialist philosopher, who was Heidegger’s affair a few months ago. NEURATH: Well […]
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me , or we , who ‘really’ knows. A promising analytical approach to this problem has emerged in recent years, which is […]
What does reason consist really in? What it is for? And why are humans, of all the millions of species having populated the earth, the only one that enjoys such a wonderful capacity? The French psychologist Hugo Mercier and anthropologist Dan Sperber (though in both cases the labels are poorly informative of the multifarious work […]
In the previous entry , I described Nick Bostrom’s argument for the ‘simulation hypothesis’, i.e., the conjecture that we are very, very likely living not in a ‘real’ world, but within some kind of computer simulation, and ended offering some skeptical doubts about its structure by comparing it to Bertrand Russell’s prankish argument about whether […]
One important principle of any sensible social epistemology is that the fraction of crazy-sounding ideas that are really crazy is extremely high. Of course, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas have turned out being right (e.g., the evolution of different species from common ascent, the earth’s being a planet turning around a star, the atomic composition […]
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, etc.— to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that may be different to ourselves. Attributing thoughts to others allows one to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. It enables one […]
It is said that Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that convinced the ‘nearly medieval’ Europeans of his time of the sphericity of the earth, a legend that has captured the popular imagination since then. Nothing could […]
As we saw in the previous entries (1,2), the representational theory of measurement (RTM), mainly developed around the mid of the 20 th century, was one of the main warhorses of the by then vigorous positivist ideal of scientific knowledge. According to that theory, the application (and the applicability) of numbers and other mathematical concepts […]
In the previous entry we saw how the so called ‘Representational Theory of Measurement’ appeared to solve one of the deepest problems in the empiricist account of scientific knowledge: how to justify the use of numbers in science (and the calculations that used them), taking into account that all knowledge was supposed to be grounded […]