Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
“Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.”
(Feyerabend, 1975)
“I often wished I had never written that fucking book”
(Feyerabend, 1995)
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied 1962, p. 219).”
—György Lukács (1962), Preface to The Theory of the Novel
“Schopenhauer’s philosophy rejects life in every form and confronts it with nothingness as a philosophical perspective. [… N]othingness as the pessimist outlook […] is quite unable, according to Schopenhauer’s ethics […], to prevent or even merely to discourage the individual from leading an enjoyable contemplative life. On the contrary: the abyss of nothingness, the gloomy background of the futility of existence, only lends this enjoyment an extra piquancy. Further heightening it is the fact that the strongly accented aristocratism of Schopenhauer’s philosophy lifts its adherents (in imagination) way above the wretched mob that is short-sighted enough to fight and to suffer for a betterment of social conditions. So Schopenhauer’s system, well laid out and architecturally ingenious in form, rises up like a modern luxury hotel on the brink of the abyss, nothingness and futility. And the daily sight of the abyss, between the leisurely enjoyment of meals or works of art, can only enhance one’s pleasure in this elegant comfort.
“This, then, fulfils the task of Schopenhauer’s irrationalism: the task of preventing an otherwise dissatisfied sector of the intelligentsia from concretely turning its discontent with the ‘established order’, i.e., the existing social order, against the capitalist system in force at any given time.”
—György Lukács (1962/1981, pp. 242-243). The destruction of reason. London: Merlin Press Ltd.
“… the following are two incontrovertible facts about a randomized clinical trial:
1. over all randomizations the groups are balanced;
2. for a particular randomization they are unbalanced.
Now, no [statistically] ‘significant imbalance’ can cause 1 to be untrue and no lack of a significant balance can make 2 untrue. Therefore the only reason to employ such a test must be to examine the process of randomization itself. Thus a significant result should lead to the decision that the treatment groups have not been randomized…”
– Senn (1994, p. 1716)
Senn, S. (1994). Testing for baseline balance in clinical trials. Statistics in Medicine, 13, 1715–1726.
There is no such thing as parametric or non-parametric data. There are parametric and non-parametric statistical models.
“The term nonparametric may have some historical significance and meaning for theoretical statisticians, but it only serves to confuse applied statisticians.”
– Noether, G. E. (1984, p. 177)
“. . . the distribution functions of the various stochastic variables which enter into their problems are assumed to be of known functional form, and the theories of estimation and of testing hypotheses are theories of estimation of and of testing hypotheses about, one or more parameters, finite in number, the knowledge of which would completely determine the various distribution functions involved. We shall refer to this situation for brevity as the parametric case, and denote the opposite situation, where the functional forms of the distributions are unknown, as the non-parametric case.”
– Wolfowitz, J. (1942, p. 264)
Noether, G. E. (1984). Nonparametrics: The early years—impressions and recollections. American Statistician, 38(3), 173–178.
Wolfowitz, J. (1942). Additive Partition Functions and a Class of Statistical Hypotheses. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 13(3), 247–279.
“The tendency of empiricism, unchecked, is always anti-realist; it has a strong tendency to degenerate into some form of verificationism: to treat the question of what there is (and even the question of what we can – intelligibly – talk about) as the same question as the question of what we can find out, or know for certain; to reduce questions of metaphysics and ontology to questions of epistemology.”
—Strawson, G. (1987, p. 267)
Strawson, G. (1987). Realism and causation. The Philosophical Quarterly, 37, 253–277.
“The positivist picture of the structure of scientific theories is now widely rejected. But the underlying idea that scientific theories are primarily designed to predict and explain claims about what we observe remains enormously influential, even among the sharpest critics of positivism.” (p. 304)
“Phenomena are detected through the use of data, but in most cases are not observable in any interesting sense of that term. Examples of data include bubble chamber photographs, patterns of discharge in electronic particle detectors and records of reaction times and error rates in various psychological experiments. Examples of phenomena, for which the above data might provide evidence, include weak neutral currents, the decay of the proton, and chunking and recency effects in human memory.” (p. 306)
“Our general thesis, then, is that we need to distinguish what theories explain (phenomena or facts about phenomena) from what is uncontroversially observable (data).” (p. 314)
Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. The Philosophical Review, XCVII(3), 303–352.
What a lovely paper! Here are some excerpts:
‘A mechanism is one of the processes in a concrete system that makes it what it is—for example, metabolism in cells, interneuronal connections in brains, work in factories and offices, research in laboratories, and litigation in courts of law. Because mechanisms are largely or totally imperceptible, they must be conjectured. Once hypothesized they help explain, because a deep scientific explanation is an answer to a question of the form, “How does it work, that is, what makes it tick—what are its mechanisms?”’ (p. 182; abstract)
‘Consider the well-known law-statement, “Taking ‘Ecstasy’ causes euphoria,” which makes no reference to any mechanisms. This statement can be analyzed as the conjunction of the following two well-corroborated mechanistic hypotheses: “Taking ‘Ecstasy’ causes serotonin excess,” and “Serotonin excess causes euphoria.” These two together explain the initial statement. (Why serotonin causes euphoria is of course a separate question that cries for a different mechanism.)’ (p. 198)
‘How do we go about conjecturing mechanisms? The same way as in framing any other hypotheses: with imagination both stimulated and constrained by data, well-weathered hypotheses, and mathematical concepts such as those of number, function, and equation. […] There is no method, let alone a logic, for conjecturing mechanisms. […] One reason is that, typically, mechanisms are unobservable, and therefore their description is bound to contain concepts that do not occur in empirical data.’ (p. 200)
‘Even the operations of a corner store are only partly overt. For instance, the grocer does not know, and does not ordinarily care to find out, why a customer buys breakfast cereal of one kind rather than another. However, if he cares he can make inquiries or guesses—for instance, that children are likely to be sold on packaging. That is, the grocer may make up what is called a “theory of mind,” a hypothesis concerning the mental processes that end up at the cash register.’ (p. 201)
Bunge, M. (2004). How Does It Work?: The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34(2), 182–210.
“It may seem strange that we are trying to understand causality using causal models, which clearly already encode causal relationships. Our reasoning is not circular. Our aim is not to reduce causation to noncausal concepts but to interpret questions about causes of specific events in fully specified scenarios in terms of generic causal knowledge…” (Halpern & Pearl, 2005).
“It may seem circular to use causal models, which clearly already encode causal information, to define actual causation. Nevertheless, there is no circularity. The models do not directly represent relations of actual causation. Rather, they encode information about what would happen under various possible interventions” (Halpern & Hitchcock, 2015).
Halpern, J. Y., & Pearl, J. (2005). Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach. Part I: Causes. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 56(4), 843–887.
Halpern, J. Y., & Hitchcock, C. (2015). Graded Causation and Defaults. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 66(2), 413–457.
“The aim of critical realist philosophy is, when the practice is adequate, to provide a better or more adequate theory of the practice; and, when it is not, to transform the practice in the appropriate way. That is to say the aim of critical realist philosophy is enhanced reflexivity or transformed practice (or both). […]
“Since there is only one world, the theories and principles of critical realist philosophy should also apply to our everyday life. If they do not, then something is seriously wrong. This means that our theories and explanations should be tested in everyday life, as well as in specialist research contexts.”
—Bhaskar, Roy (2013) The consequences of the revindication of philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory. In: Archer, Margaret and Maccarini, Andrea, (eds.) Engaging with the world. (pp. 11-21). Routledge: London.
“Sociologist Sherry Turkle’s 2011 book Alone Together argues that through our increased use of technology we remain connected but increasingly isolated from one another. This turn of phrase is frequently weaponized to undermine the value of the digital and speaks recklessly through a white, straight, cisgender lens. Turkle’s fear-mongering equation Internet = alienation fails to take into consideration the enduring relevance of this material most specifically for queer people, female-identifying people, and people of color. To reify the binary of, on the one hand, the Internet as a dead utopia and, on the other, “real life” (read: IRL) as being devoid of actual and/or social death for QTPOCIA+ bodies is a violent propaganda. The Internet remains a club space for collective congregation of marginalized voices and bodies when all else fails. In fact and in concept “real life” as it travels in an unbroken loop between on- and offline is sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist.”
—Legacy Russell (2020, p. 124). Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto