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Critical philosophy – Kantianism and neo-Kantianism – is also a school and not a solution. The Critique of Pure Reason can be said to deal with science or philosophy only within the narrow limits of an artificial, particularised experience (confined to laboratory or academic study). Similarly, the Critique of…
Enlightened believe in science, observation, and understanding of natural phenomenon. The word Solstice reflects that on this one day, the sun stands still How did the ancients explain this? With Fear or Celebration? They turned to astronomy and the observation of the heavenly bodies that dance in the depths of space…
As I gathered information for this book, I was continually reminded of the reality that science, rooted as it is in the certainties of the physical world, is a process that necessarily unfolds over time. In school, science classes tend to work according to this linear model; there's a “beginning, middle, and end” to…
Communication between humans and MB is essentially pointless. The computational capacity difference between a MB and a human is on the order of 1016 (ten million billion) times greater than the difference between a human and a nematode (~109)! A single MB can emulate the entire history of human thought in a few…
Sometimes in an upper-level class I’ll assign a problem I don’t expect students to solve. It either involves some subtle trick, or requires theoretical techniques they haven’t yet learned. I assign them because I want students to struggle a bit with problems for which the solutions aren’t clear. “Wander into the…
To stop teaching literature and the other arts on the grounds that they're bad for us would be like refusing to study diseases because they're bad for us. However, maybe there should be a moratorium on requiring those who don't really want to, to take courses in the "humanities." We first have to figure out where we…
In everyday life remembering occurs within social contexts, and theories from a number of disciplines predict cognitive and social benefits of shared remembering. Recent debates have revolved around the possibility that cognition can be distributed across individuals and material resources, as well as across groups of…
Science, with its naturalistic approach to understanding the empirical world, has become the dominant standard against which alternative systems of knowledge production must argue. Over the course of the twentieth century, some denominations have reconciled particular truths of Christianity and science. However…
When viewed closely, however, CBN‘s and Robertson‘s openness to science seems less about a conservative Christian paradigmatic shift and more about CBN‘s relationship with the public. CBN‘s devotion to engagement with mainstream culture inevitably requires engagement with science because science is inextricably…
Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word 'simplest'. It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The…
The value of fundamental research does not lie only in the ideas it produces. There is more to it. It affects the whole intellectual life of a nation by determining its way of thinking and the standards by which actions and intellectual production are judged. If science is highly regarded and if the importance of…
The possibilities of modem technology were first in practice realised in England by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be reached. In their technological…
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically…
Knowledge understanding The facts The meaning of the facts A body of coherent facts The “theory” that provides coherence and meaning to those facts Verifiable claims Fallible, in-process theories Rightor wrong A matter of degree or sophistication I know something to be true I understand why it is, what makes it…
The debate surrounding the consensus on climate change is complicated by the complexity of both the scientific and the associated sociopolitical issues. Underlying this debate is a fundamental tension between two competing conceptions of scientific inquiry: the consensual view of science versus the dissension view…
While the IPCC’s consensus approach acknowledges uncertainties, defenders of the IPCC consensus have expended considerable efforts in the ‘boundary work’ of distinguishing those qualified to contribute to the climate change consensus from those who are not [4]. These efforts have characterized skeptics as small in…
Each of our four theoretical traditions (Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, Majoritarian Interest Group Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism) emphasizes different sets of actors as critical in determining U.S. policy outcomes, and each tradition has engendered a large empirical literature that…
Before you judge the analogy with theology as being too harsh, conduct the followingexperiment. Randomly select one of your own publications from a year or two ago and think about what would be involved in reproducingthe results. How longwould it take, assumingyou would be able to do it? If you can’t reproduce those…
Mathematics is one of humanity’s great achievements. By enhancing the capabilities of the human mind, mathematics has facilitated the development of science, technology, engineering, business, and government. Mathematics is also an intellectual achievement of great sophistication and beauty that epitomizes the power…