Putting Notions in Motion: Epistemological Leaps in Model Building

“Tarski has stressed in his lecture (and I think justly) the great importance of the concept of Turing's computability. It seems to me that this importance is largely due to the fact that with this concept one has for the first time succeeded in giving an absolute notion to an interesting epistemological notion, i.e., one …

Epistemic Idealism Through Physicalism

Suppose you're a good honest physicalist, you believe that all that exists is physical. This is in stark contrast to philosophies (ontologies) like Berkeley's idealism, where all things are ideas, reality itself is a form of thought, and therefore the universe is mental or spiritual. The latter idea as a metaphysics has largely fallen out …

Will Future Civilizations Believe in the Rest of Our Universe?

Science is often seen as the modern way to obtain truths. We know the earth orbits the sun, it is true. Those who work closely in the field know the process of actually doing science, both theoretical and experimental, can be painstakingly tedious, but if we’re careful we’ll always reach the truth, right? The answer …

The Empirical Heart of Mathematics

Mathematics is often grouped together with the many other sciences, despite science supposedly being an empirical study of some domain; while math for centuries has been claimed by the rationalists. I argue however that math is indeed a kind of science, albeit a very strange one. While physics is the study of natural laws, chemistry …