University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Department of History and Philosophy of Science > Provisional knowledge

  Browse A-Z

Log in

Cambridge users (raven)details Other usersdetails No account?details

Information on

Subscribing to talksdetails Finding a talkdetails Adding a talkdetails Disseminating talksdetails Help and Documentationdetails

Provisional knowledge

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Peter.Lipton.

Physics, and science generally, rarely function according to the mechanist tradition of founding all scientific knowledge on ‘shaped matter in motion’ of the parts of a system. Rather we employ a vast range of explanatory strategies a great many of which work in terms of ‘stripping detail’ when detail is not relevant to the problem at hand. Most of these strategies involve some level of idealisation, inaccuracy, or distortion, which raises the worry: When accounts in science involve distortion, how can they count as knowledge? This problem motivates reconstruing knowledge, and in particular its requirement of (exact) truth in its content component, in terms of the kinds of standards that require something less than perfect precision and accuracy, much as the context and interest dependent standards that we apply for representational accuracy of things such as maps and pictures. Since, logically, no evaluation by comparison with an unrepresented reality is possible, evaluation of any representational scheme can take place only on the basis of some other (in general) relatively precise and accurate scheme; and the scheme that functions as our platform for the moment can only be evaluated pragmatically.

This talk is part of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science series.

Tell a friend about this talk:

This talk is included in these lists:

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.

Other lists

Skewness, Heavy Tails, Market Crashes, and Dynamics Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity Turkish-Armenian Relations. Facing History: Denial as a Security Concept

Other talks

Graph Legendrians and SL2 local systems Aromatic foldamers: mastering molecular shape White dwarfs as tracers of cosmic, galactic, stellar & planetary evolution A lifelong project in clay: Virtues of Unity The importance of seed testing Elizabeth Bowen's Writings of the Second World War PTPmesh: Data Center Network Latency Measurements Using PTP Black and British Migration Existence of Lefschetz fibrations on Stein/Weinstein domains Dynamics of Phenotypic and Genomic Evolution in a Long-Term Experiment with E. coli Market Socialism and Community Rating in Health Insurance Refugees and Migration
 

© 2006-2024 Talks.cam, University of Cambridge. Contact Us | Help and Documentation | Privacy and Publicity