A substantial part of philosophy of science has devoted itself to the production of straw man arguments in the absence of any real breakthrough and substantial contribution. Especially troublesome are attempts to question the validity of empirically confirmed physical laws, such as the law of conservation of energy in mechanics, by applying them arbitrarily and without any reality check to absurd thought experiments involving the concept of infinity and point masses. The latest paper disposed in the junk archive is a clear indication of the state of decadence in contemporary philosophy of science.
Get Your Hierarchies Straight People
Anti-Realism Does Not Need Name Calling
We get many of these name callings lately. Realism of such and such individual. Anti-realism of such and such individual. The latest is by a paper titled “Can van Fraassen’s anti-realism give an account of novel predictions of unexpected phenomena?”. Obviously, another name calling for whatever reason.
How Some Scientists Use Incomprehensibility to Advance Their Status
Being able to convey complex ideas in plain language is a sign of intelligence. Yet, in modern science, doing that is not considered a good way of advancing a career. This is because nowadays giving an incomprehensible speech or writing an incomprehensible paper is considered a sign of intelligence, especially when it is accompanied by standard titles we all know how easy they are to get in certain cases.
Precognition May Be the Result of the Brain Calculating Probabilities
Epistemology Thrives on Straw Man Arguments and Defeats Common Sense
Another epistemological shock today from another paper in PhilSci-Archive , the archive that has refused to publish my papers. Epistemology nowadays seems to thrive on straw man arguments. In the paper Judgment Aggregation and the Problem of Tracking the Truth, the authors give the following example:
FTL neutrinos? I don’t think so
It was reported in a paper signed by 117 authors that neutrinos went faster than the speed of light. As expected this has generated a lot of speculation and talk about a violation of Relativity Theory. I’m not surprised. You should not be either.
Paper Review: “The fate of presentism in modern physics”
Quite often one can immediately sense the setting up of a straw man argument from the title. This is the case in my opinion with the paper by Christian Wuthrich, “The fate of presentism in modern physics”. Actually, the title should have been “The fate of eternalism in modern physics”.
Is Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability just a Scholastic Argument?
In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Joe Salerno provides the following introduction to Fitch’s paradox of knowability:
Let us divide by zero – It is a free country
My first post deals with division by zero and how it can be used to basically prove anything. What is frightening is that division ny zero is allowed in some philosophy departments around the world.
This is an example for the beginners from Wikipedia: