Related papers: Functional Epistemology "Nullifies" Dyson's Rebutt…
Developing and organizing new knowledge is a core activity for scholars. Recently, ontologies have been introduced as an approach for organizing knowledge. However, most ontologies do not readily support the development and organization of…
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with gaining knowledge. It is closely related to ontology. The branch that deals with questions like "What is real?" and "What do we know?" as it provides these components. When using…
The functional interpretation is a systematic, syntactic method for transforming certain non-constructive proofs into constructive proofs with explicit bounds. We illustrate the interpretation by working through a concrete, fairly simple…
In this paper, epistemology and ontology of quantum states are discussed based on a completely new way of founding quantum theory. The fundamental notions are conceptual variables in the mind of an observer or in the joint minds of a group…
A new formalism is introduced to treat problems in quantum field theory, using coherent functional expansions rather than path integrals. The basic results and identities of this approach are developed. In the case of a Bose gas with…
Astrobiology is a scientific discipline that studies life in the Universe. We call it a discipline and not a science because some authors have cast doubts over its epistemological status by calling it 'a science without an object of study'.…
We explore a functionalist approach to emotion by employing an ansatz -- an initial set of assumptions -- that a hypothetical concept generation model incorporates unproven but biologically plausible traits. From these traits, we…
Computational functionalism about consciousness is often criticized for relying on observer-relative interpretations of physical systems. This paper proposes a mathematical refinement of functionalism that avoids this problem. The central…
In this paper of "The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics" series we investigate the epistemological significance and sensibility (and hence interpretability and interpretation) of classical mechanics in its Newtonian and non-Newtonian…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
Operational frameworks are very useful to study the foundations of quantum mechanics, and are sometimes used to promote antirealist attitudes towards the theory. The aim of this paper is to review three arguments aiming at defending an…
This paper argues against the proposal to draw from current research into a physical theory of quantum gravity the ontological conclusion that spacetime or spatiotemporal relations are not fundamental. As things stand, the status of this…
Educational Data Mining (EDM) shows interesting scientific results lately. However, little has been discussed about philosophical questions regarding the type of knowledge produced in this area. This paper aims to present two…
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,…
This paper describes and motivates a new decision theory known as functional decision theory (FDT), as distinct from causal decision theory and evidential decision theory. Functional decision theorists hold that the normative principle for…
AI applications across classification, fairness, and human interaction often implicitly require ontologies of social concepts. Constructing these well, especially when there are many relevant categories, is a controversial task but is…
Roughly speaking, functional analysis is the study of vector spaces of arbitrary dimension over the field of real or complex numbers, and the continuous linear mappings between such spaces. Naturally, the notion of continuity requires a…
Functional Distributional Semantics is a framework that aims to learn, from text, semantic representations which can be interpreted in terms of truth. Here we make two contributions to this framework. The first is to show how a type of…
Functionals are an important research subject in Mathematics and Computer Science as well as a challenge in Information Technologies where the current programming paradigm states that only symbolic computations are possible on higher order…
The scientific methodology based on two descriptive levels, ontic (reality as it is ) and epistemic (observational), is briefly presented. Following Schr\"odinger, we point to the possible gap between these two descriptions. Our main aim is…