Related papers: Democritus as Taoist
I review the philosophical literature on the question of when two physical theories are equivalent. This includes a discussion of empirical equivalence, which is often taken to be necessary, and sometimes taken to be sufficient, for…
Analogues of Kolmogorov comparison theorems and some of their applications were established.
Although much has been said about parallelism in discourse, a formal, computational theory of parallelism structure is still outstanding. In this paper, we present a theory which given two parallel utterances predicts which are the parallel…
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…
I review a number of cognate issues that, taken together, pertain to the creation of a non-reductionistic theory of multiscale coordination and present one candidate theory based on the principle of dynamical similarity.
In the classical (non-quantum) relativity theory the course of the moving clock is dilated as compared to the course of the clock at rest (the Einstein dilation). Any unstable system may be regarded as a clock. The time evolution (e.g., the…
The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…
We discuss the possibility of making the {\it initial} definitions of mutually different (possibly interacting, or even entangled) systems in the context of decoherence theory. We point out relativity of the concept of elementary physical…
This paper presents and philosophically assesses three types of results on the observational equivalence of continuous-time measure-theoretic deterministic and indeterministic descriptions. The first results establish observational…
It is often argued that superluminal velocities and nontrivial spacetime topologies, allowed by the theory of relativity, may lead to causal paradoxes. By emphasizing that the notion of causality assumes the existence of a time arrow (TA)…
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…
I discuss Ren{\'e} Thom's approach to philosophy based on his mathematical background. At the same time, I will highlight his connection with Aristotle, his criticism of the modern view of science as a predictive process, his ideas on…
We analyze, from a theoretical viewpoint, the bidirectional interdisciplinary relation between mathematics and psychology, focused on the mathematical theory of deterministic dynamical systems, and in particular, on the theory of chaos. On…
The paper analizes a set of issues related to analogy and analogical reasoning, namely: 1) The problem of analogy and its duplicity; 2) The role of analogy in demonstrative reasoning; 3) The role of analogy in non-demonstrative reasoning;…
For more than half a century, dualities have been at the heart of modern physics. From quantum mechanics to statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity, dualities have proven useful in solving…
A direct classical analog of the quantum dynamics of intrinsic decoherence in Hamiltonian systems, characterized by the time dependence of the linear entropy of the reduced density operator, is introduced. The similarities and differences…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
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…
One classical theory, as determined by an equation of motion or set of classical trajectories, can correspond to many unitarily {\em in}equivalent quantum theories upon canonical quantization. This arises from a remarkable ambiguity, not…
Topological semantics for modal logics has recently gained new momentum in many different branches of logic. In this paper, we will consider the topological semantics of both classical and paraconsistent modal logics. This work is a new…