if-then knots
space for a paper airplane raceMach on the value of history and philosophy of science.
Hat tip to Ralf Krömer’s “Tool and Object: a history and philosophy of category theory” where I found this bit of support for my cherished intellectual projects:
The historical investigation of the development of a science is most needful, lest the principles treasured up in it become a system of half-understood prescripts, or worse, a system of prejudices. Historical investigation not only promotes the understanding of what which now is, but also brings new possibilities before us, by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental. From the higher point of view at which different paths of thought converge we may look about us with freer vision and discover routes before unknown.
Mach, Ernst. 1960. The Science of Mechanics: A critical and historical account of its development. La Salle (Illinois): Open Court.
Multiple reductions and ontic structural realism.
Ladyman and Ross argue that only structure is real and that it is ontologically basic. They make no distinction distinction between physical and mathematical structure, refusing to answer the question how such a distinction is grounded. Yet, they seem to rely on the distinction no less. After all, they distinguish empirical, physical science from mathematics. Physics is interested in the physical structures, not any coherent mathematical structure. Those are what mathematicians study.
One position to take would be to hold that the physical structures are just one slice of the mathematical structures. Indeed, this modernized Pythagoreanism is suggested by Ladyman and Ross, specifically endorsed by mathematical phycicist John Baez, and is defended as plausible speculative cosmology by MIT phycisist Max Tegmark.
Read the rest of this entry »
Review of “Space, Time, Matter, and Form”
Since I haven’t posted anything new in a while… how about something I wrote for a course last fall.
End of Summer Update
It’s been a busy summer. The garden has done ok thought my squash plant died from an infestation ofter giving me four fruits. Traveling back and forth to the Chi-burbs: 3 weddings and two weeks helping Conscious Cup, the family business, run a concession stand at the MCYSA International Championships. All very fun, but time consuming and productivity disrupting. I’m a creature that thrives on routine and there hasn’t been enough of it lately.
The Second Ace
Check out this post at Choice and Inference if you liked my earlier posts on probability puzles (here, here, and here). The puzzle is given as a possible counterexample to reflection for credences, but is worked out nicely in the comments over there. I was too late to the party to add what I learned from jd2718, but the solution to the second ace puzzle is pretty much the same as the solution to the dice puzzle that had initially fooled me when jd2718 presented it to me in comments.
Blogging about philosophy is hard.
I’ve got a few drafts of longer posts, but find myself always wanting to mull things over more and revise. I suppose that, in thinking ahead to my dissertation, it’s right to be in a stage of thinking through a large project and that blogging lends itself to short bursts of ideas or to defending worked out positions. Also, this still feels like launching words into the void; it’s hard to write anything if you don’t have a sure feeling of audience.
Sharing cool videos, on the other hand, is easy.
… but then neither is property.
Writing at National Review Online’s “The Corner” conservative commentator Stephen Spruiell claims:
Health care is not a right, at least not according to the conception of rights upon which this country was founded. Your rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You may not be unjustly deprived of these things. Your rights do not include things that I or anyone else must be forced to provide for you, such as a home, a car, a job, or health care.
I would be surprised to find the founders univocal on the nature of rights, but I understand that the narrow conception of “negative rights” was historically important and represents a distinct concept of “right” from the one employed in claiming that health care or education is a right.
Rusell… Really.
In wondering why Russell has shown well in the Leiter poll, Weatherson actually winds up making a pretty decent case for Berty, or so it seems to me. Fitelson and Chalmers speak up on Russell’s behalf in the comments.
Plantinga v. Dennett
I wish I’d been there… Philosophy title fight between theist Plantinga and atheist Dennett.
I’ve seen Plantinga give a talk presenting some of his arguments. They depend essentially on sophistical fabrication of prior probabilities. The link I’ve given takes Dennett to task for rudeness, and I would not be surprised if this is true. I don’t see what the “new atheists” think they’re accomplishing in mocking bare theism. To be sure, any degree of literalism about Christian mythology is absurd (talking snakes, human sacrifice, drinking blood…) , but I think that bare theism–basically deism–can be respectably held. Anyhow, I empathize with Dennett’s impulse to rude response to some extent because in a way mockery is about all that you can do when the “argument” is just the other person insisting on a bunch of a priori probability judgments, but I also agree with this reviewer that the rudeness is likely counterproductive. Naturalists can and should try to do better. Read the rest of this entry »
Ulysses contracts and the voter paradox.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot and working things over, so not much to say on the philosophy of mathematics front. . . maybe not for a little while. I’ve got some ideas brewing on the following topics: (1) category theory vs set theory foundations, (2) whether the application of SU(n) in physics and the discoveries derived from that application are “more surprising” than widely discussed examples in the history & philosophy of science (e.g. the discovery of Neptune), and (3) whether a wannabe-nominalist who accepts naturalized epistemology can answer Burgess and Rosen’s anti-nominalist arguments. Even granting that a blog is a space for working through ideas in progress, I’m not sure I’m ready to say a whole lot about these things just yet, at least not until I work through at least some of the stack of books and articles I’m accumulating. Read the rest of this entry »
jrshipley
