Epistemology

Transformative truth: how truth changes thought

Truth is not a fact but an event. Truth behaves like the inverse of electrons: the moment it is observed, it determines the state of the observer.

Error and the Limits of Truth

Every model of reality contains a greater or lesser portion of reality. Error is the point at which reality exceeds the model. This is why a culture that seeks to eliminate error risks also losing the principal mechanism through which it discovers the limits of its own representations.

Seen but Not Proven

The epistemic responsibility of medical communication on social media. What can an American philosopher in love with Hollywood comedy teach us about the surgeon who posts photographs of their work on Instagram?

Notes towards a Definition of the Concept of Education

To begin, education must be defined as a category in the strong sense. Without a strong definition, education is reduced to morality, custom, policy or social adaptation.

Questioning satisfactory explanations

The most insidious errors arise from explanations convincing enough to bring the search for alternatives to a halt.

Our house is burning. And other linear predictions.

‘Have you seen how much Giovannino has grown? If he carries on like this, by the time he’s twenty he’ll be at least three metres tall.’

AI and Incarnation

The significance of an action increases when the subject has a stake in its outcome. The incarnation is one of the most extraordinary and least understood facts of the Christian tradition. For almost two thousand years, Christians have affirmed that God enters history as a man who is born, grows up, and knows hunger, thirst, fatigue, physical pain, anguish and death.

The Dominant Paradigm

With the birth of formal mathematics, particularly in ancient Greece, and then with its modern systematisation, humanity begins to conceive of complex abstract thought. The world is reduced to numbers, proportions and ideal forms. Thought takes on a deductive, sequential structure.

The Boundaries of Knowledge

From the twentieth century onwards, with the crises in the foundations of mathematics, scientific revolutions and the emergence of the cognitive sciences, a decisive epistemological rift opens at the heart of thought: knowledge is no longer understood as a closed, self-sufficient and deductively complete system. Rather, it appears as an open, unstable, processual and constitutively interpretative field.

What Is Worth Knowing?

No cognitive system, human or artificial, processes the world: it selects a small part of the world and makes it tractable. True intelligence, then, lies in being able to see what one’s own process of selection has excluded.

Medicine does not treat desires

The doctor does not take the patient’s desire as the basis for a treatment decision.