Related papers: Against Fundamentalism
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
The universality of mesoscales, ranging between elemental particles and the universe, is discussed here by reviewing widely disparate fields and presenting four cases, at differing hierarchical levels, from chemistry, chemical engineering,…
Our collective views regarding the question "what is fundamental?" are continually evolving. These ontological shifts in what we regard as fundamental are largely driven by theoretical advances ("what can we calculate?"), and experimental…
The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides…
A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
Background: Philosophers of science including Collins, Feyerabend, Kuhn and Latour have all emphasized the importance of consensus within scientific communities of practice. Consensus is important for maintaining legitimacy with outsiders,…
The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
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…
Classical mathematics (involving such notions as infinitely small/large and continuity) is usually treated as fundamental while finite mathematics is treated as inferior which is used only in special applications. We first argue that the…
We present two lines of reasoning, leading to elementary constituents more fundamental than the ones we know. One such arguments is new, and based on the holographic maximal bound for the number of degrees of freedom of any system. In this…
What would you do if you were asked to "add" knowledge? Would you say that "one plus one knowledge" is two "knowledges"? Less than that? More? Or something in between? Adding knowledge sounds strange, but it brings to the forefront…
This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and…
On the occasion of Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker's 81st birthday, a colloquium was held on July 3, 1993. One of the topics was "The epistemological foundation of physics from Kant to von Weizsaecker". I took part in the discussion.…