I'm looking for a department program that is at the intersection of philosophy of science, philosophy of education, philosophy of mind and graphic design
“The replication crisis is less of a ‘crisis’ in the Lakatosian approach than it is in the Popperian and naïve methodological falsificationism approaches”
"The difficulties encountered in implementing [Open Science] across diverse research environments are tied to philosophical assumptions about how science does – and ought to – work."
I am utterly saddened that I won't be able to travel to Haifa tonight to teach the students of the Technion #PhilosophyOfScience.
My flight was canceled due to the horrific events unfolding in #Israel & #Gaza at the moment.
In my book, randomly & systematically murdering civilians is NOT fighting for freedom, no matter how oppressed you are. It's terrorism. I'm utterly disgusted by those who don't seem to understand that.
So much hate and senseless violence. It makes me speechless.
Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse
Rom Harré, 1990
"The academic ‘we’ might seem at first glance to be just a version of the editorial ‘we’. Like the latter it is mutedly egocentric but it is not mainly used to imply teamwork. Rather, it is used to draw the listener into complicity, to participate as something more than an audience. "
It’s been a while since I shared an Existential Comic. This one gets at a question we’ve discussed before, although it’s been several years. What exactly is the distinction between the physical and non-physical, in this case between science and magic?
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537Credit: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537Corey Mohler, the author, has a short write-up under the comic at his site, citing Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and J.R.R. Tolkien having his elves not understand what the hobbits mean when they ask to see elven magic. All the elves have are knowledge and capabilities, some of which seem like “magic” to mortals. (This isn’t always true in Tolkien’s mythology. Divine beings, for instance, have capabilities no one else can attain. But Tolkien mostly implies it’s just more of nature rather than anything distinct.)
Which brings us back to the question, what exactly is magic, the supernatural, or the non-physical? For that matter, what is the physical? The answer I’ve reached before, is the physical is anything that interacts with other physical things and evolves according to rules, rules we can hope to discover, at least to some degree. When we encounter something that doesn’t follow the rules as we understand them, historically we don’t assume we’ve found anything magical. We take it as something for which we just don’t know the rules yet.
Even in cases where we fail to understand the rules for a long time, we tend to just figure out what we can about it, and “black box” the rest. Isaac Newton had to do it with gravity, early modern biologists with the “spirit” that seemed to animate nerves, Charles Darwin with inheritance, and particle physicists today do it with quantum measurement.
Fantasy stories, like Harry Potter, usually present magic as something obviously distinct. But it’s telling that one of the things any fantasy author has to consider is what the “rules of magic” are for their fictional world. Just because it’s fantasy doesn’t mean anything goes, at least not in quality stories that avoid cheating with deus ex machina type events. In that sense, the challenge is similar to the rules of fictional science that sci-fi authors have to work out in their worlds.
Orson Scott Card once said that the real difference between the fantasy genre and science fiction is that one tends to have swords, wizards, and supernatural monsters in it, while the other machines, spaceships, and hi-tech monsters. (Since then, the borders have gotten blurrier, with both genres expanding into each other.)
All of which seems to indicate that magic, as commonly intuited, is just old notions of how the world works, albeit in a caricatured and romanticized form in contemporary fiction. In that sense, science is the successor, the new magic that’s taken us far beyond what the old variety was able to achieve.