Category Archives: Epistemology

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

In my last post, I have discussed the The Postulates of Linguistic Agreement. In this post, I will discuss how is it applied to scientific method. Let’s first considering the following thought experiment. Assuming someone who believes that before leaving the house everyday, tap the left foot three times will bring good fortune for the day.Continue reading “Scientific Method and Linguistic Agreement”

Rene Descartes has famously stated in the opening of Meditations on First Philosophy: “Cogito, ergo sum“, or better known as “I think, therefore I am.” In a world that objectivity is our default understanding, Descartes’s skepticism and John Locke’s empiricism have often been misunderstood to mean that the existence of the external world is subjectiveContinue reading “The Postulates of Linguistic Agreement”

Many people think that science is a difficult subject. The idea of p test is a complex idea that is so unattainable by the general public. But in reality, besides the usage of jargon, most scientific publications only use basic arithmetic that is learned in elementary school. I think it is crucial for everyone toContinue reading “Probability and Scientific Method”