Related papers: Ontology, Ontologies, and Science
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
There is wide agreement that ethical considerations are a valuable aspect of a data science curriculum, and to that end, many data science programs offer courses in data science ethics. There are not always, however, explicit connections…
The Internet and the Web are now an integral part of the way most modern societies, and corresponding political systems, work. We regard Political systems as the formal and informal political processes by which decisions are made concerning…
We analyse the implications of the closure of the physical for experiments in the scientific study of consciousness when all the details are considered, especially how measurement results relate to physical events. It turns out that the…
Ontologies order and interconnect knowledge of a certain field in a formal and semantic way so that they are machine-parsable. They try to define allwhere acceptable definition of concepts and objects, classify them, provide properties as…
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…
Because of the increasing number of electronic data, designing efficient tools to retrieve and exploit documents is a major challenge. Current search engines suffer from two main drawbacks: there is limited interaction with the list of…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
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…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance ontology for…
The issue of ontology in quantum mechanics, or equivalently the issue of the reality of the wave function is critically examined within standard quantum theory. It is argued that though no strict ontology is possible within quantum theory,…
The philosophical foundations of statistics involve issues in theoretical statistics, such as goals and methods to meet these goals, and interpretation of the meaning of inference using statistics. They are related to the philosophy of…
Ontology merging is important, but not always effective. The main reason, why ontology merging is not effective, is that ontology merging is performed without considering goals. Goals define the way, in which ontologies to be merged more…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
Scientific research is a major driving force in a knowledge based economy. Income, health and wellbeing depend on scientific progress. The better we understand the inner workings of the scientific enterprise, the better we can prompt,…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
In this article we present and discuss a didactic activity that combines epistemic aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and a simple, relatively low-cost experiment on electromagnetic induction. The aim of the activity is for students to…
From pathogens and computer viruses to genes and memes, contagion models have found widespread utility across the natural and social sciences. Despite their success and breadth of adoption, the approach and structure of these models remain…
Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…