Definition of universality, pt. 2
Recently, I started looking for a way to formalize what seems to me essential to the definition of “universality,” that a universal claim must say something meaningful (meaning falsifiable) about every...
View ArticleRealism
I’ve been reading Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, which Bryant and his publisher have kindly made available for free online ahead of print. I’m generally sympathetic to the speculative realist...
View ArticleQuine as literary theory
W.V.O. Quine’s project in Word and Object is the derivation of a formal language suitable for scientific hypothesis in a way that does not rely, like logical positivism, on protocol sentences that are...
View ArticlePositivity
I used to claim that there was no such thing as self-expression in art. That’s not something I’d say any more, but not because I’ve changed my mind. Quite the opposite; I’ve gotten even more dead set...
View ArticleDebunking vs explaining
I’m often surprised how many smart people I encounter who think of science as some kind of beauty-destroying machine. This is a particularly common reaction to the attempts of neuroscientists and...
View ArticleLooking to the future
In the Sixteenth century, the word “innovation” connoted a rebellion or an insurrection, a violent affront to the prevailing order. This usage suggests a small-c conservatism that’s largely lost out to...
View ArticleSpeaking objectively
The “plain style” of speech that has just about completely supplanted the “high” rhetoric of the past is in part a remnant of an early version of the scientific method that claimed to root knowledge in...
View ArticleThe Language of Mathematics (1)
I’m working on a software project (more soon) that involves a notation that is interpreted by computers. As a way of specifying the language formally, I’m trying out parsing expression grammars, a...
View ArticleI’m like . . .
I just discovered (a few months late) the mesmerizing Tumblr “What Should We Call Me.” Each post on the blog pairs generalized descriptions of situations with animated GIFs, most often showing a...
View ArticleThe Ontic Web
Recently I’ve been reading about RDF, which is an attempt by the World Wide Web Consortium to create a standard way of representing information about “resources,” which is the word that they use for...
View Article