Related papers: Science and Illusions
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
The classical conception of falsification presents scientific theories as entities that are decisively refuted when their predictions fail. This picture has long been challenged by both philosophical analysis and scientific practice, yet…
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…
Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses…
Many see modern science as having serious defects, intellectual, social, moral. Few see this as having anything to do with the philosophy of science. I argue that many diverse ills of modern science are a consequence of the fact that the…
It is explained in detail why the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science. Cases which have been claimed as successful predictions from the AP are shown to be not that.…
In this paper, we reject commonly accepted views on fundamentality in science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction to isolate the alleged fundamental entities. We do not introduce any new scientific methodology, but…
According to Karl Popper assumptions are statements used to construct theories. During the construction of a theory whether the assumptions are either true or false turn out to be irrelevant in view of the fact that, actually, they gain…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
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…
Statistics has made tremendous advances since the times of Fisher, Neyman, Jeffreys, and others, but the fundamental and practically relevant questions about probability and inference that puzzled our founding fathers remain unanswered. To…
We revisit Popper's falsifiability criterion. A tester hires a potential expert to produce a theory, offering payments contingent on the observed performance of the theory. In our model, instead of knowing the true data-generating process,…
The persisting gap between the formal and the informal mathematics is due to an inadequate notion of mathematical theory behind the current formalization techniques. I mean the (informal) notion of axiomatic theory according to which a…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
Recent reports claim that Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved the ability to derive new science and exhibit human-level general intelligence. We argue that such claims are not rigorous scientific claims, as they do not satisfy…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
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…
The problem of induction has persisted since Hume exposed the logical gap between repeated observation and universal inference. Traditional attempts to resolve it have oscillated between two extremes: the probabilistic optimism of Laplace…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…