Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

Bayes and the ‘old evidence’ problem Among the many achievements of Newton’s theory of gravitation was its prediction of the tides and their relation to the lunar orbit. Presumably the success of this prediction confirmed Newton’s theory, or in Bayesian terms, the observable facts about the tides e raised the probability of Newton’s theory h. But the Bayesian it turns out can make no such claim. Because the facts about the tides were already known when...

The fatal flaw of mathematics .[embedded content] Gödel’s incompleteness theorems raise important questions about the foundations of mathematics. The most important concerns the question of how to select the specific systems of axioms that mathematics are supposed to be founded on. Gödel’s theorems irrevocably show that no matter what system is chosen, there will always have to be other axioms to prove previously unproved truths. This, of course, ought to...

Social mechanisms and inference to the best explanation Epistemologically speaking, all theory is a representation of reality, an intellectual construct, and it is always abstract: it can never catch the full-bodied reality … But if we accept the theory, we accept that the generative mechanism is real. That is, not only could it have produced the outcome, but having ruled out alternative explanations, we believe that it did produce the outcome … But we...

.[embedded content] The term ‘Münchhausen Trilemma’ is used in epistemology to stress the impossibility to prove any truth (even in logic and mathematics). The term was coined by Albert in 1968 in reference to Popper’s Trilemma of dogmatism vs. infinite regress vs. psychologism.

Is gender a social construct? .[embedded content] Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in a idealist ‘slippery slope.’ Just shifting a biologically...

I have argued against the postmodern tendency to flip from naive objectivism to relativism and idealism, from totalities to fragments, and from ethnocentrisms to new forms of self-contradictory cultural relativism. A realist approach shows us that we can escape from these alternatives. The Modernist project — and more specifically, critical social science — don’t need foundationalism or notions of absolute truth. They can be not only better understood but furthered through a...

For the idealist, the fact that the Inuit have many words for snow while the bush people of the Kalahari desert have none is merely a function of their different languages and has nothing to do with any extra-discursive reality … However, those who claim that reality is a discursive construct don’t believe what they say, for their practice — for example avoiding extra-discursive dangers, such as oncoming cars — shows that they cannot make the world a slave to their discourses...

Facts and values — a critical realist perspective .[embedded content]

Revisiting Myrdal’s ‘solution’ to the problem of value-bias Recognition of the phenomena of rationalization and mystification as the effects of unconscious interference enables us to pinpoint the error in an influential ‘solution’ to the problem of ‘value-bias’, authorized inter alia by Myrdal. On this solution, recognizing that value-neutrality is impossible, all the social scientist needs to do is state his or her own value assumptions fully and...

.[embedded content]