Related papers: Naturalistic intuitionism for physics
We sharpen a recent observation by Tim Maudlin: differential calculus is a natural language for physics only if additional structure, like the definition of a Hodge dual or a metric, is given; but the discrete version of this calculus…
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This…
At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has…
One of the main claims of the paper is that Dirac's calculus and broader theories of physics can be treated as theories written in the language of Continuous Logic. Establishing its true interpretation (model) is a model theory problem. The…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
We explore the landscape of technical naturalness for nonrelativistic systems, finding surprises which challenge and enrich our relativistic intuition already in the simplest case of a single scalar field. While the immediate applications…
For the purpose of analyzing observed phenomena, it has been convenient, and thus far sufficient, to regard gravity as subject to the deterministic principles of classical physics, with the gravitational field obeying Newton's law or…
Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…
We propose a reformulation of gravitation in which the gravitational interaction is treated as a genuine force rather than an inertial effect arising from spacetime geometry. Within this framework, the difference between the affine…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
Starting from the revelation of the nature of inertial forces, this article discusses the subdivision of the basic physical concept of space-time and raises questions about the metric of standard cosmology. A new form of particle dynamics…
Several different proof translations exist between classical and intuitionistic logic (negative translations), and intuitionistic and linear logic (Girard translations). Our aims in this paper are (1) to consider extensions of…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
There is a contemporary trend toward geometrizing all mathematical theories, as proposed by the Langlands program, and, by extension, physical theories as well. Within this paradigm, it becomes possible to represent physical objects as…
Newtonian gravity can be regarded as a hypothetic-deductive system where the inverse square law is the starting point from which gravitational phenomena are deduced. This operational form of presenting gravity endorses problem solving and…
This paper has two goals. The first goal is to show how an extension of second-order logic is a natural framework to formalize portions of Aristotle's \emph{Topics} and to bring to the foreground the logical, linguistic and philosophical…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…
I contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…