Related papers: A Farewell to Falsifiability
Here, by introducing a version of Unexpected hanging paradox first we try to open a new way and a new explanation for paradoxes, similar to liar paradox. Also, we will show that we have a semantic situation which no syntactical logical…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
Much has been discussed in the philosophy of science about how we should understand the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, scientific realists believe that empirically adequate theories can be supplemented by interpretations that can…
Quantum field theory offers physicists a tremendously wide range of application; it is both a language with which a vast variety of physical processes can be discussed and also it provides a model for fundamental physics, the so-called…
At the present time, string theory (and its generalizations) remain relatively abstruse subjects to the particle phenomenologist and experimentalist. Yet, striking developments of the last two years offer hope that a fundamental…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
Plausible reasoning concerns situations whose inherent lack of precision is not quantified; that is, there are no degrees or levels of precision, and hence no use of numbers like probabilities. A hopefully comprehensive set of principles…
We revisit the vexed question of how unpredictability can arise in a deterministic universe, focusing on unitary quantum theory. We discuss why quantum unpredictability is irrelevant for the possibility of what some people call `free-will',…
What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
Here we argue that the notion of falsifiability, a key concept in defining a valid scientific theory, can be quantified using Bayesian Model Selection, which is a standard tool in modern statistics. This relates falsifiability to the…
We offer a critical assessment of some generic features of various of the current approaches towards the construction of a Theory of Quantum Gravity. We will argue that there is a need for further conceptual clarifications before such an…
Practically measurable quantities resulting from quantum field theory are not described by hermitian operators, contradicting one of the cornerstone axioms of orthodox quantum theory. This could be a sign that some of the axioms of orthodox…
Claims that the standard methodology of scientific testing is inapplicable to Everettian quantum theory, and hence that the theory is untestable, are due to misconceptions about probability and about the logic of experimental testing.…
Assuming string theorists will not soon provide a compelling case for the primary theory underlying particle physics, the field will proceed as it has historically: with data stimulating and testing ideas. Ideally the soft supersymmetry…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
String theory has not even come close to a complete formulation after half a century of intense research. On the other hand, a number of features of the theory suggest that the theory, once completed, may be a final theory. It is argued in…
The predictions that quantum theory makes about the outcomes of measurements are generally probabilistic. This has raised the question whether quantum theory can be considered complete, or whether there could exist alternative theories that…