Philosophia Polymathematica

Disclaimer: References to postmodernists herein should be construed to mean laypersons whose thinking is influenced by postmodernism, not postmodernists in the strict sense. One of the basic tenets of good thinking is that one must base their reasoning on how things are rather than how one wishes things to be. The greatest challenge that postmodernity has hurled at us is that the conception of how things are has been so thoroughly blended with how one wishes things to be that the two constructs have been rendered inextricable. Postmodernism’s consistent messaging about the purely subjective nature of truth and the impossibility of objective truths can have the undesirable effect of orienting one to believe that how one wishes things to be is actually how those things are. This misguided understanding can then be used as the basis for further misguided reasoning. I encounter my fair share of truth relativists (often very obstinate ones) at my weekly philosophy club meetings. Despit...

The 20th century philosopher of science, Karl Popper, through his falsifiability criterion, proposed a novel approach to scientific discovery. Though his criterion was eventually shown to be flawed, it nonetheless at least bequeathed us with knowledge of how not to practice science. Popper’s falsifiability criterion was, at its core, rooted in the Humean problem of induction. His essential argument was that empirical statements were no more verifiable than metaphysical ones since they were inductively derived from true premises. The inherent, obvious error in Popper’s conclusion aside, ironically enough, Popper never considered that the judgments necessitated through his own proposed criterion were ultimately not free of verification.   The verifiability criterion is a long-standing central tenet of science according to which scientific claims must necessarily be observable in the world or induced from experience. Rejecters of inductivism, on the other hand, would assert that inf...