Related papers: Science Under Attack
This is a talk concerning the irrationality of prominent physicists with regard to the foundations of quantum mechanics, delivered at a conference on the irrationality of the postmodern attack on science by nonscientists.
While philosophy of science is the study of problems of knowledge concerning science in general, there also exists - or should exist - a '' philosophy in science'' directed at finding out in what ways our actual scientific knowledge may…
What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and…
Research in foundations of physics is stagnant, as claimed by many scientists during the last years. I suggest that one reason might be the reification of language, particularly of mathematics, which favour the search for answers to wrong…
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…
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
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…
Most work on scholarly document processing assumes that the information processed is trustworthy and factually correct. However, this is not always the case. There are two core challenges, which should be addressed: 1) ensuring that…
Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Traditionally, to be a realist about something means believing in the independent existence of that something. In this line of thought, a scientific realist is someone who believes in the objective existence of the entities postulated by…
An attempt to redefine science in the 21st century (BK Jennings, On the Nature of Science, Physics in Canada, 63(7) 2007) has abandoned traditional notions of natural law and objective reality, blurred the distinctions between natural…
Data science is not a science. It is a research paradigm with an unfathomed scope, scale, complexity, and power for knowledge discovery that is not otherwise possible and can be beyond human reasoning. It is changing our world practically…
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…
Why do nations produce scientific research? This is a fundamental problem in the field of social studies of science. The paper confronts this question here by showing vital determinants of science to explain the sources of social power and…
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…
An indeterministic interpretation of classical physics has been proposed recently, in which the argument relies on attacking an alleged unwarranted metaphysical hidden assumption of the standard deterministic interpretation. This short…
Modern science developed within a culture of Judeo-Christian theism, and science and theism have generally supported each other. However, there are certainly areas in both science and religion that puzzle me. Here I outline some puzzles…
We outline a metacircular argument explaining why it is rational to be irrational when attacking open-world decentralized systems, and why systems whose security depend on rationality assumptions are insecure.