The Sun rose from the East in the morning. Is the sentence true? What does mean that it is true? Does it mean that the event that the sentence described has occurred, or that the sentence is a perfect representation of what has happened? How can a string of symbols or sound represent the physicalContinue reading “Philosophy of Language: The Language Game”
Author Archives: RhapsodySea
Scientific Method, Conditional Probability, and p-value
In the last episode, I have discussed the basics of probabilities. To recap, the probability is the measurement of the characteristics of a population, not individuals of the population. If we have a bag of marbles with half of which are red and the other half are blue, when we draw one out of theContinue reading “Scientific Method, Conditional Probability, and p-value”
Scientific Method and Probability
In previous episodes, I have discussed the principles of the scientific method: Observability, Falsifiability, and Reproducibility. I have given some examples of those principles using scientific theories that can give predictions of certainty such as Newtonian mechanics. But in recent years, more and more scientific discoveries are starting to making probabilistic predictions instead of predictionsContinue reading “Scientific Method and Probability”
Philosophy of Language: Relationship, and Numbers
In the last episode, I discussed one way in which words gain their meaning: definition by reference. When a community agreed to use the same word to refer to the entities with some shared similarities, the word became the reference to those entities. Words like “cat”, “dog”, “cloud”, and “rainbow” are some of the examplesContinue reading “Philosophy of Language: Relationship, and Numbers”
Philosophy of Language: Senses and References
Have you ever thought about how can we know that the red color in my mind is the same red color that is in your mind when we see the same image? Early 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has proposed the following thought experiment: Consider a group of people in a room, each of them holdsContinue reading “Philosophy of Language: Senses and References”
Scientific Method: 3. Falsifiability
Mathematics often gets a bad reputation among students. It is often perceived as abstract, confusing, useless, and completely made up. Those perceptions are not all true. Math does not just deal with obscured numbers and equations. It is a language for describing relationships between, well, everything. The fact is, every sentence we speak or thinkContinue reading “Scientific Method: 3. Falsifiability”
Scientific Method: 2. Reproducibility
In this episode, I will talk about the reproducibility principle of the scientific method. I want to start the discussion by defining the word “Truth”. In the last episode, I stated that the scientific method is the only way known to humans that leads to the objective truth. But if I were to convince youContinue reading “Scientific Method: 2. Reproducibility”
Scientific Method: 1. Observability
Started from middle school, I was required to learn Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. In college, I have to study social science and political science to fulfill my general education credits. In retrospect, I have been studying science for almost all my life. But only until about two years ago, I started asking questions about theContinue reading “Scientific Method: 1. Observability”
On Racial Disparity and Nature vs Nurture
In the past couple of weeks, racial tension and unrest has raged through United States. As a outsider, I hope to understand better of the problem. So here is me, sharing about some of the things that I have learned in the past couple of week. To be be able to solve a problem, firstContinue reading “On Racial Disparity and Nature vs Nurture”
The Attack on MSF in Afganistan
There was an attack on a maternity ward inside a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan yesterday. The hospital is operated by Doctor Without Borders. From the information at hand, it would seems that the attackers were intentionally targeting the mothers while they were at the most vulnerable state. I don’t know if I need to addContinue reading “The Attack on MSF in Afganistan”