What Is Scientific Progress?
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Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge
....... CONJECTURES sense similar to that in which processes or things may be said to be parts of the world; that the world consists of facts in a sense in which it may be said to consist of (four dimensional) processes or of (three dimensional) things. They believe that, just as certain nouns are names of things, sentences are names of facts. And they sometimes even believe that sentences are some- thing like pictures of facts, or that they are projections of facts.7 But all this is mistaken. The fact that there is no elephant in this room is not one of the processes or parts ofthe world; nor is the fact that a hailstorm in Newfound- 10 land occurred exactIy I I I years after a tree collapsed in the New Zealand bush. Facts are something like a common product oflanguage and reality; they are reality pinned down by descriptive statements. They are like abstracts from TRUTH, RATIONALITY, AND THE a book, made in a language which is different from that of the original, and determined not only by the original book but nearly as much by the principles GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE of selection and by other methods of abstracting, and by the means of which the new language disposes. New linguistic means not only help us to describe 1. THE GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE: THEORIES AND PROBLEMS new kinds of facts; in a way, they even create new kinds of facts. In a certain sense, these facts obviously existed before the new means were created which I were indispensable for their description; I say, 'obviously' because a calcula- tion, for example, ofthe movements of the planet Mercury of 100 years ago, MY aim in this lecture is to stress the significance of one particular aspect of carried out today with the help of the calculus of the theory of relativity, may science-its need to grow, or, if you like, its need to progress. -
1 What Is Scientific Progress?
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilSci Archive What is Scientific Progress? Lessons from Scientific Practice Moti Mizrahi St. John’s University Forthcoming in Journal for General Philosophy of Science Abstract: Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how. Keywords: aim of science; Alexander Bird; Darrell Rowbottom; scientific knowledge; scientific practice; scientific progress 1 1. Introduction According to Chang (2007, p. 1), “Scientific progress remains one of the most significant issues in the philosophy of science today.” This is partly because it seems rather odd to deny that science is making progress, but it is difficult to articulate in what sense exactly science is making progress. -
Pragmatism and Progressivism in the Educational Thought and Practices of Booker T
PRAGMATISM AND PROGRESSIVISM IN THE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT AND PRACTICES OF BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Ronald E. Chennault DePaul University Few men, particularly Black men, have wielded the power and influence of Booker T. Washington during his lifetime. A good deal of his colorful life is recounted in his autobiography, Up from Slavery.1 Here Washington details the most notable events of his life, from the time he spent in slavery as a youth, to his exploits and education during his adolescence, and well into his career as head of the then-Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Washington tells of his experiences at present-day Hampton University and the extraordinary influence the lessons he learned and the people he met there had on his life philosophy. He also reserves a large part of his story to describe numerous occasions during which he spread his institution’s seeds of success and offered his advice on improving America’s race relations. Yet as revealing as his account is, both by reading its lines and between its lines, Washington’s autobiography represents only a piece of his life’s puzzle. If Washington is the “trickster” that Harlan imagines and McElroy argues,2 a fairer and fuller understanding of Washington’s wizardry necessitates moving beyond his autobiography. Restricting our understanding of Washington to his self-representation in Up from Slavery (even extending to his photographic self-representation)3 and allowing his account to epitomize his worldview does more than “oversimplify Washington . it further contributes to the uncritical acceptance of Washington’s propagandistic portrayal of Tuskegee’s goals, programs, and accomplishments.”4 Many gaps in his life story can be filled by consulting primary sources such as Washington’s writings and speeches as well as by looking to extensive biographical and numerous scholarly works on Washington. -
Progress Pacific: the Fastest Way to Turn Ideas Into Business Reality
OVERVIEW www.progress.com THE FASTEST WAY TO TURN IDEAS INTO BUSINESS REALITY OVERVIEW Businesses require powerful applications with purpose. Today, business works in the HIGHLIGHTS palm of your user’s hands—so your applications must work there as well. To meet Rapid application business user expectations, your company must have a simple way to create apps fast development: Browser- without relying on deep technical skills or expensive IT resources. Apps must connect to based visual design critical data in real-time. And they must be able to analyze data results immediately. requiring minimal coding Mobile & Web: Create apps WHAT IT DOES tailored for the best web and Progress® Pacific™ is a modern Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that makes it easy for mobile experience businesses to rapidly build data-driven apps and deploy them on any cloud or device. Data driven: Connect your The Pacific (PaaS gives you the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment app to the data used inside environments and business logic that best fit your needs. Support your enterprise, your company and by your developers and customers with cloud-enabled applications and grow into new markets customers with Progress Pacific. Gain business insight: Self- service data integration, BENEFITS report building and CREATE NEW APPS FAST WITH MINIMAL CODING collaboration Modern application development is about the immediate ability to turn ideas into Platform Services: deployed solutions. Your customers want to move from “What if?” to “Now I can” as Core architectural and soon as tomorrow. Your Pacific installation includes a rapid application development governance services enable platform that works within a web browser. -
Understanding the Progress of Science
Understanding the Progress of Science C. D. McCoy 30 May 2018 The central problem of epistemology has always been and still is the problem of the growth of knowledge. And the growth of knowledge can be studied best by studying the growth of scientific knowledge. —(Popper, 2002b, xix) Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. —(Husserl, 1970, 6) The growth of human knowledge is realized most dramatically in the growth of scientific knowledge. What we have come to know through science about the workings of our human bodies and the workings of heavenly bodies, among much else, astounds, especially in comparison to our accumulating knowledge of the commonplace and everyday. Impressed by the evident epistemic progress made by science, many philosophers during the 20th century thought that studying how scientific knowledge increases is a crucial task of epistemological inquiry, and, indeed, the progress of science has been a topic of considerable interest. Yet, eventually, late in the century, attention waned and for the most part shifted to other tasks. Recently, however, a provocative article by Bird has re-ignited philosophical interest in the topic of scientific progress (Bird, 2007). Bird criticizes what he takes to have been the most prominent accounts advanced in the 20th century and presses for what he views as a venerable but lately overlooked one. He claims that realist philosophers of science have often presumed that truth is the goal of science and progress to be properly characterized by an accu- mulation of truth or truths, and notes that anti-realists have often rejected truth as a goal of science and characterized progress in terms of, among other things, “problem-solving effectiveness.”1 He criticizes the former for overlooking the relevance of justification to progress and the latter for giving up on truth. -
Crop Progress
Crop Progress ISSN: 1948-3007 Released August 9, 2021, by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Agricultural Statistics Board, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Corn Silking – Selected States [These 18 States planted 92% of the 2020 corn acreage] Week ending 2016-2020 State August 8, August 1, August 8, Average 2020 2021 2021 (percent) (percent) (percent) (percent) Colorado ............................................. 93 86 95 89 Illinois ................................................. 99 96 97 97 Indiana ............................................... 96 93 96 92 Iowa .................................................... 98 92 96 96 Kansas ............................................... 94 88 93 94 Kentucky ............................................. 94 91 93 93 Michigan ............................................. 94 91 97 83 Minnesota ........................................... 99 96 99 96 Missouri .............................................. 99 89 96 98 Nebraska ............................................ 97 97 99 96 North Carolina .................................... 100 98 100 99 North Dakota ...................................... 90 69 86 89 Ohio .................................................... 93 88 93 87 Pennsylvania ...................................... 72 57 72 83 South Dakota ...................................... 94 83 94 91 Tennessee .......................................... 97 95 97 98 Texas ................................................. 97 93 94 97 Wisconsin .......................................... -
An Introduction to Philosophy
An Introduction to Philosophy W. Russ Payne Bellevue College Copyright (cc by nc 4.0) 2015 W. Russ Payne Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5 Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11 Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23 Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38 Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58 Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72 Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79 Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94 Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108 Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120 2 Introduction The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. -
The P–T Probability Framework for Semantic Communication, Falsification, Confirmation, and Bayesian Reasoning
philosophies Article The P–T Probability Framework for Semantic Communication, Falsification, Confirmation, and Bayesian Reasoning Chenguang Lu School of Computer Engineering and Applied Mathematics, Changsha University, Changsha 410003, China; [email protected] Received: 8 July 2020; Accepted: 16 September 2020; Published: 2 October 2020 Abstract: Many researchers want to unify probability and logic by defining logical probability or probabilistic logic reasonably. This paper tries to unify statistics and logic so that we can use both statistical probability and logical probability at the same time. For this purpose, this paper proposes the P–T probability framework, which is assembled with Shannon’s statistical probability framework for communication, Kolmogorov’s probability axioms for logical probability, and Zadeh’s membership functions used as truth functions. Two kinds of probabilities are connected by an extended Bayes’ theorem, with which we can convert a likelihood function and a truth function from one to another. Hence, we can train truth functions (in logic) by sampling distributions (in statistics). This probability framework was developed in the author’s long-term studies on semantic information, statistical learning, and color vision. This paper first proposes the P–T probability framework and explains different probabilities in it by its applications to semantic information theory. Then, this framework and the semantic information methods are applied to statistical learning, statistical mechanics, hypothesis evaluation (including falsification), confirmation, and Bayesian reasoning. Theoretical applications illustrate the reasonability and practicability of this framework. This framework is helpful for interpretable AI. To interpret neural networks, we need further study. Keywords: statistical probability; logical probability; semantic information; rate-distortion; Boltzmann distribution; falsification; verisimilitude; confirmation measure; Raven Paradox; Bayesian reasoning 1. -
Degrees of Riskiness, Falsifiability, and Truthlikeness. a Neo-Popperian
Degrees of riskiness, falsifiability, and truthlikeness. A neo-Popperian account applicable to probabilistic theories. Leander Vignero Sylvia Wenmackers [email protected] [email protected] KU Leuven, Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2 { bus 3200, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. July 7, 2021 (Forthcoming in Synthese.) Abstract In this paper, we take a fresh look at three Popperian concepts: riskiness, falsifiability, and truthlikeness (or verisimilitude) of scien- tific hypotheses or theories. First, we make explicit the dimensions that underlie the notion of riskiness. Secondly, we examine if and how degrees of falsifiability can be defined, and how they are related to var- ious dimensions of the concept of riskiness as well as the experimental context. Thirdly, we consider the relation of riskiness to (expected degrees of) truthlikeness. Throughout, we pay special attention to probabilistic theories and we offer a tentative, quantitative account of verisimilitude for probabilistic theories. \Modern logic, as I hope is now evident, has the effect of enlarging our abstract imagination, and providing an infinite number of possible hypotheses to be applied in the analysis of any complex fact." { Russell (1914, p. 58). A theory is falsifiable if it allows us to deduce predictions that can be compared to evidence, which according to our background knowledge could arXiv:2107.03772v1 [physics.hist-ph] 8 Jul 2021 show the prediction | and hence the theory | to be false. In his defense of falsifiability as a demarcation criterion, Popper has stressed the importance of bold, risky claims that can be tested, for they allow science to make progress. -
Citizen Science: Framing the Public, Information Exchange, and Communication in Crowdsourced Science
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2014 Citizen Science: Framing the Public, Information Exchange, and Communication in Crowdsourced Science Todd Ernest Suomela University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Communication Commons, and the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Suomela, Todd Ernest, "Citizen Science: Framing the Public, Information Exchange, and Communication in Crowdsourced Science. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2864 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Todd Ernest Suomela entitled "Citizen Science: Framing the Public, Information Exchange, and Communication in Crowdsourced Science." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Communication and Information. Suzie Allard, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Carol Tenopir, Mark Littmann, Harry Dahms Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Citizen Science: Framing the Public, Information Exchange, and Communication in Crowdsourced Science ADissertationPresentedforthe Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Todd Ernest Suomela August 2014 c by Todd Ernest Suomela, 2014 All Rights Reserved. -
2020 Social Progress Index Methodology Summary
Das 2020 SOCIAL PROGRESS INDEX Methodology Summary By Scott Stern, Petra Krylova & Jaromir Harmacek Acknowledgements ConstructinG the Social ProGress Index is a siGnificant research effort which involves months of desk research, data collection, cleaninG, transformations and calculations. This would not be possible without the leadership of Michael Green and Luke Greeves, alonGside the Board of Directors, and support from all our colleagues. In particular, this year’s index would not have been possible without the invaluable research assistance of Rory Rolt, and Tawab Safi. We also want to thank Tamar Epner and Amy Wares for layinG strong and well documented foundations for the Index which enabled us to pick up the baton. Our gratitude also goes to Brent Nagel and Alex Stetter for their editorial support and ensuring a very smooth communications and design process. Suggested Citation Index Social ProGress Imperative: 2020 Social ProGress Index. Social ProGress Imperative. WashinGton, DC. Available at: www.socialproGress.orG Methodology Stern, S., Krylova, P. & Harmacek, J.: 2020 Social ProGress Index MethodoloGy Summary. Social ProGress Imperative. WashinGton, DC. Available at: www.socialprogress.org/global/methodology Contact For technical queries regarding the index, please contact Petra Krylova ([email protected]) or Jaromir Harmacek ([email protected]). For any other queries, please contact Brent NaGel ([email protected]) or visit our website www.socialproGress.orG. 2 | socialproGress.orG 2020 Social Progress -
Why Advocate Pancritical Rationalism?
Why Advocate Pancritical Rationalism? Darrell P. Rowbottom and Otávio Bueno Abstract This paper provides a rationale for advocating pancritical rationalism. First, it argues that the advocate of critical rationalism may accept (but not be internally justified in accepting) that there is ‘justification’ in an externalist sense, specifically that certain procedures can track truth, and suggest that this recognition should inform practice; that one should try to determine which sources and methods are appropriate for various aspects of inquiry, and to what extent they are. Second, it argues that if there is external justification, then a critical rationalist is better off than a dogmatist from an evolutionary perspective. Introduction Consider two individuals. One believes h dogmatically, and will never give it up. The other believes h just as strongly (i.e., has the same synchronic degree of belief), but is prepared to reconsider that belief in the light of criticism. Is the latter in a better position than the former? From an ordinary language point of view, it seems as if the advocate of (comprehensively) critical rationalism thinks so; and therefore also believes that the latter is ‘justified’ in believing h in a manner that the former is not. Why else recommend the critical attitude? A possible answer is that the former individual is incapable of learning (insofar as h is concerned), whereas the latter clearly is so capable. But if we accept that one can learn something that is false, as (comprehensively) critical rationalists tend to, then this seems insufficient. Learning could lead one to false beliefs, rather than just true ones.