Related papers: Religious and Scientific Faith in Simplicity
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
At the beginning, programming was inspired by the search of the best solutions. At that time some fundamental stones like famous languages and object oriented and structured programming were laid. It was found later that applications could…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The scientific method is often presented, e.g. to children, as a linear process, starting by a question and ending by the elaboration of a theory, with a few experiments in-between. The reality of the building of science is much more…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…
Lately there has been a lot of discussion about why deep learning algorithms perform better than we would theoretically suspect. To get insight into this question, it helps to improve our understanding of how learning works. We explore the…
The combination of evidence in Dempster-Shafer theory is compared with the combination of evidence in probabilistic logic. Sufficient conditions are stated for these two methods to agree. It is then shown that these conditions are minimal…
Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to…
Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held…
Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…
In this introductory note, I describe my particular view of the notion of ontological commitments as honest and pragmatic working hypotheses that assume the existence (out there) of certain entities represented by the symbols in our theory.…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if only to uncover deeper points of disagreement and, ideally,…
We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence, that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…
We lay the groundwork for a formal framework that studies scientific theories and can serve as a unified foundation for the different theories within physics. We define a scientific theory as a set of verifiable statements, assertions that…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…