Whewell\'s Wager: The Continuing Dialogue of Metaphysics and Physics in Science

In his library at Trinity College, Cambridge University, around the year I860, William Whewell (1794-1866) engages in conversation with a company of thinkers on the province of metaphysics and physics, to form a comprehensive scientific belief. In attendance with him are Lord Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Sir Robert Boyle (1627-1691 ), Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) , John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Professor Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), and Pope John Paul II (b. 1920). Whewell proposes a wager: Is there a possible remedy to be found for the schism between the metaphysical and the physical elements of science

The Epistemology of “Epistemology Naturalized”

Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology

Value’s of Mathematics Education and Citizenship Education

Currently, the Indonesian plane of life is miserable, inparticular on behavior. It is shown by the mushrooming acts of corruption, bribery, anarchy, public deceiving, traffic incompliance, etc. This mean any problem in nation character. The nation character building is the duty of citizenship education. The mission of citizenship education in Indonesian is develop or build the nation character as the instructional effects and nurturant effects. Whereas, another courses include mathematics course have to develop the nation characters through the nurturent effect of the instructional. This paper discussed about the relationship between values of mathematics education and characters contained in Citizenship Education. Key word: value, character, mathematics, citizenshi

Quantity and number

Quantity is the first category that Aristotle lists after substance. It has extraordinary epistemological clarity: "2+2=4" is the model of a self-evident and universally known truth. Continuous quantities such as the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle are as clearly known as discrete ones. The theory that mathematics was "the science of quantity" was once the leading philosophy of mathematics. The article looks at puzzles in the classification and epistemology of quantity

(WP 2020-01) The Sea Battle Tomorrow: The Identity of Reflexive Economic Agents

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium and open process conceptions of the economy, and argues the former fails to explain time in a before-and-after sense in connection with Aristotle’s sea battle problem. A causal model is developed to represent the process conception, and a structure-agency understanding of the adjustment behavior of reflexive economic agents is illustrated using Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy analysis. Simon’s account of how adjustment behavior has stopping points is then shown to underlie how agents’ identities are disrupted and then self-organized, and the identity analysis this involves is applied to the different identity models of Merton, Ross, Arthur, and Kirman. Finally, the self-organization idea is linked to the recent ‘preference purification’ debate in bounded rationality theory regarding the ‘inner rational agent trapped in an outer psychological shell,’ and it is argued that the behavior of self-organizing agents involves them taking positions toward their own individual identities