Related papers: Formalism 25
We examine the classical/intuitionist divide, and how it reflects on modern theories of infinitesimals. When leading intuitionist Heyting announced that "the creation of non-standard analysis is a standard model of important mathematical…
In this paper we investigate the history of relationalism and its present use in some interpretations of quantum mechanics. In the first part of this article we will provide a conceptual analysis of the relation between substantivalism,…
The dominant view of design in information systems and software engineering, the Rational Design Paradigm, views software development as a methodical, plan-centered, approximately rational process of optimizing a design candidate for known…
In the present study we attempt to incorporate the philosophical dialogue about physical reality into the instructional process of quantum mechanics. Taking into account that both scientific realism and constructivism represent, on the…
Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…
This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations changing.…
This book explores an alternative to the current dominant paradigm where a discrete computer model is constructed as an attempt to approximate some continuum theory. We focus on a class of discrete computer models that are based on simple…
The integration of lexical semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of the meaning of natural lan- guage has prompted changes to the global framework derived from Montague. In those works, the original lexicon, in which words were assigned…
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…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
Although Bohr's reply to the EPR argument is supposed to be a watershed moment in the development of his philosophy of quantum theory, it is difficult to find a clear statement of the reply's philosophical point. Moreover, some have claimed…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…
In this essay we describe a platonic metaphysics where time is a fundamental idea such that the passage of time is independent of observers and the laws of physics. Furthermore, time serves to distinguish between a real and an abstract…
In a recent preprint [1] Jeffrey Bub presents a discussion of neo-Bohrian interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also of von Neumann's work on infinite tensor products [2]. He rightfully writes that this work provides a theoretical…
In this article, we argue that the theory of special relativity, as formulated by Einstein, is a philosophical rather than a scientific theory. What is scientific and experimentally supported is the formalism of the relativistic mechanics…
In this article I deal with the notion of observation in the most fundamental sense and its representation by means of formal languages serving as expressional tools of formal-axiomatical theories. In doing so, I have taken this notion in…
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…