Recent content by wave

By the same principles that guided him to murder or not murder his wife.

Your notion of reason is different from my definition. An explanation is not a justification if it doesn't follow from a basic belief. A pure rationalist may use experience to explain a belief, but that is not a justification according to foundationalists.

Yes, I concur. I tried to use weaker phrasing to avoid making assertions. :smile: I exclude strict empiricism and strict rationalism from my basic beliefs for that reason. Science definitely relies on some of the ideas from empiricism and rationalism. However, those ideas are unified...

Belief is a mental state. To believe in proposition X is to think that X is true. Reason is used synonymously with justification in the context of foundationalism. An Agnostic Theist would be an example of someone who believes without reason. In particular, they believe in the existence of...

I agree. Thanks for the response! I think science and deism are compatible, but I am undecided when it comes to other forms of theism. More specifically, it is not obvious to me whether science and fideism are fundamentally compatible as two basic beliefs. I often struggle with this...

I am very interested in your response to the regress problem. In addition, do you think science and theism are compatible and why?

Firefox thinks your default profile is active because there is a lock on it. I've seen that happen when I run Firefox on two or more machines under the same network account. It can also happen if Firefox didn't terminate properly. You can fix it by deleting the lock file(s) in your profile...

You mean a syntactic proof? \models is a semantic notion, so the following semantic proof will suffice: Suppose \Gamma \cup \{\varphi\} \models \psi but not \Gamma \models (\varphi \rightarrow \psi). Then there is some truth assignment \tau that satisfies \Gamma and \varphi but not \psi. But...

It pretty much follows from the definition of \models. Suppose \Gamma \cup \{\varphi\} \models \psi. Then every truth assignment that satisfies \Gamma \cup \{\varphi\} must also satisfy \psi.

OK. So which types of unfalsifiable theories would qualify as "perfect"? If not all, then please state the complete criteria.

No. Like I said, an albino raven is a counterexample. Why is it logically impossible given the way the hypothesis is stated? I don't see why a "perfect" theory, as you have defined above, cannot be held tentatively.

Are you sure? Consider the hypothesis "all ravens are black" and suppose it is "perfect" (i.e. no counterexamples exist). You won't find any instances of albino ravens, but such a counterexample is not necessarily logically impossible, right?

It depends on how the theory is stated. Perhaps you can answer your own question. What does it mean for a theory to be "falsifiable"?

String sql = "CREATE TABLE " + tableName + " ("; for (int i = 0; i < columnNames.length; i++) { sql += columnNames[i] + " " + columnType[i] + ","; } sql += ");";

Popper thought neo-Darwinism was a tautology and hence "not a testable scientific theory". For example, "survival of the fittest" is a tautology if we define "the fittest" to mean "those who survive". It is not testable and it has no explanatory power whatsoever. His argument is flawed...