Related papers: Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Views
Gottfried Leibniz embarked on a research program to prove all the Aristotelic categorical syllogisms by diagrammatic and algebraic methods. He succeeded in proving them by means of Euler diagrams, but didn't produce a manuscript with their…
I discuss how modern cosmology illustrates under-determination of theoretical hypotheses by data, in ways that are different from most philosophical discussions. I emphasize cosmology's concern with what data could in principle be collected…
Gioseffo Zarlino reintroduced the Pythagorean paradigm into Renaissance musical theory. In a similar fashion, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton reinvigorated Pythagorean ideas in celestial mechanics;…
Aristotelian assertoric syllogistic, which is currently of growing interest, has attracted the attention of the founders of modern logic, who approached it in several (semantical and syntactical) ways. Further approaches were introduced…
Statistical mechanics has proven to be able to capture the fundamental rules underlying phenomena of social aggregation and opinion dynamics, well studied in disciplines like sociology and psychology. This approach is based on the…
Did the papacy tacitly permit the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book in 1660? One scholar has recently argued that it did. A close analysis of a unique illustration from that book, Andreas Cellarius's atlas Harmonia Macrocosmica,…
I know better than to come between the experts here assembled and their research programs, so I confine these remarks to lessons to be drawn on the state of our subject from the histories of research in three Windows on the Universe:…
This paper proposes a novel framework for understanding large language models (LLMs) by reconceptualizing them as semiotic machines rather than as imitations of human cognition. Drawing from structuralist and post-structuralist theories of…
In recent years, a new class of models for multi-agent epistemic logic has emerged, based on simplicial complexes. Since then, many variants of these simplicial models have been investigated, giving rise to different logics and…
We present a generative dialogue system capable of operating in a full-duplex manner, allowing for seamless interaction. It is based on a large language model (LLM) carefully aligned to be aware of a perception module, a motor function…
This paper was written as part of a book entitled: "Questions of Modern Cosmology - Galileo's Legacy" which is a celebrative book dedicated to Galileo Galilei. The book is published in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, since it is…
Recently, there has been a heightened interest in building chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate human-like qualities in multi-turn conversations. Despite having access to commonsense knowledge to better understand the…
The ideals of the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment are the foundation of modern democracies. The era was characterized by thinkers who promoted progressive social reforms that opposed the long-established aristocracies and…
The principle that celestial bodies must move on circular orbits or on paths resulting from the composition of circular orbits has been assumed as a constant guide in the astronomical thougth of the peoples facing the Mediterranean sea as…
This article introduces the "Goldilocks model" for a few repulsively interacting particles trapped in a one-dimensional harmonic well and provides exact solutions for the three-particle case. The Goldilocks model shares features with two…
In this paper we intend to connect two different strands of research concerning the origin of what I shall loosely call "formal" ideas: firstly, the relation between logic and rhetoric - the theme of the 2006 Cambridge conference to which…
Ask your chatbot to impersonate an expert from Russia and an expert from US and query it on Chinese politics. How might the outputs differ? Or, to prepare ourselves for the worse, how might they converge? Scholars have raised concerns LLM…
We recently reported the discovery of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he attempted a 'steady-state' model of the universe, i.e., a cosmic model in which the expanding universe remains essentially unchanged due to a…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
Over the course of the last 50 years, many questions in the field of computability were left surprisingly unanswered. One example is the question of $P$ vs $NP\cap co-NP$. It could be phrased in loose terms as "If a person has the ability…