This chapter presents an introduction to the fundamental operations of the so-called Large Language Models (especially ChatGPT) for readers lacking expertise in computational linguistics. Additionally, it offers an introduction to the structure and defining characteristics of the human faculty of language for readers lacking expertise in linguistics. Similarly, an initial examination of the concept of a model in the scientific context is provided, along with an overview of the remaining chapters in this volume, whose authors I sincerely thank for their willingness to get involved in the initiative to produce this book.
@linguistics
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Continued thread
Part three of my blog series on the semantic conception of scientific theories. Is scientific representation non-linguistic? More pictorial or informal perhaps? Has it to do with idealisations?
https://pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/07/reflections-3-is-scientific.html
pragmatictheories.blogspot.comReflections (3): Is scientific representation non-linguistic? We have now settled, in conclusion of the previous article, on the most sensible interpretation of the semantic view: not a difference of g...
I'm summarising some reflections after one year of research on conceptions of scientific theories on my blog. Here's part 2 of 4(?).
Is the semantic view about there being two stages in scientific representation?
https://pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/07/reflections-2-is-semantic-view-about.html
pragmatictheories.blogspot.comReflections (2): Is the semantic view about there being two stages in scientific representation? In the previous article, I explained that there seem to be no superficial difference between the syntactic and the semantic views when it c...
Replied in thread
#HiveMind request for pointers: philosophy of science applied to technology/engineering research
On the practical equivalence between semantic and syntactic conceptions of theories
https://pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/07/having-reviewed-work-of-most.html
pragmatictheories.blogspot.comReflections (1): on the practical equivalence between semantic and syntactic conceptions of theoriesHaving reviewed the work of the most influential authors on the syntactic and semantic views of theories (and having read a bunch of article...
Review of "There Are No Such Things As Theories" (Steven French 2020) on my blog:
https://pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/07/review-of-there-are-no-such-things-as.html
pragmatictheories.blogspot.comReview of "There Are No Such Things As Theories", by Steven French In “There Are No Such Things As Theories”, Steven French defends that there are no such things as theories. This well-named book provides a...
All talks from the workshop "Structures in the sciences" at IIF UNAM (México) are available on YouTube!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9T3Tbxn-lMDH66O5pnbeg8Md8m4h1pRj&si=Nw6BAyhudDK0EKq1
youtube.comBefore you continue to YouTube
#Checklists have massive benefit in #aviation, #engineering, and #medicine.
Now #cognitiveScience has a list of 51 simple yes-no questions (from experts around the world) to design and assess #research — its quality, #reproducibility, etc.
Crowdsourcing: I'm looking for a reference to support the statement "RCTs are a cultural product". Any sociologists or philosophers of science know a good one? #philsci #healthpolicy THANKS!
"Extracting Ontological Commitments from Experimental Practice" (soon in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale) preprint available here:
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/25555/
It's a paper on Entity Realism: the view championed by Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking that we can be instrumentalist about abstract theories and laws, but realist about the unobservable entities (electrons, DNA, ...) with which scientists routinely interact and associated causal relations.
Summary below 
Adopted and donor-conceived children were way less likely to confound nature and nurture than traditionally-conceived kids (ages 4 to 8).
And this difference wasn’t explained by differences in parents.
Here's the free preprint (otherwise paywalled in Developmental Psychology): https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3e8rj
Judith Rosen is opening The First International Conferencia on Anticipatory Systems #bio #biology #philsci #complexity #Rosen #comp #phy #sci #science #theory #TheoryOfMind #theory #mind #psy #psychology #epidemiology #medicine #ecology #evo #evolution #evolutionarybiology #evo
Would you like to know how language and number knowledge are related? In this new short essay, I link advances in neuroscience research on mathematical knowledge with linguistic theory to provide an answer to this question. Hint: syntax is important!
@linguistics
#linguistics
#maths
#philsci
https://bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bioling/article/view/17287
bioling.psychopen.euThe Number Sense and the Language Instinct: Relating Syntax and Arithmetic in Human Cognition| Biolinguistics
For Belgian residents and visitors: we are screening the short film Data Shadows at VUB in Brussels on May 21 at 18, please come along & pass the word! It would be great to see you there.
More info on the film: http://opensciencestudies.eu/datashadowsfilm #philsci #art #science
opensciencestudies.euData Shadows – A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments
Continued thread
An updated and improved version of the paper briefly summarised in the thread above has now been published open access on Theoria:
https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.25837
Link to the thread: https://social.sunet.se/@dcm/111772379106183358
doi.orgAI-as-exploration
| THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science
Another article on Indigenous knowledge perspectives. Oh! this is what DIVERSITY means. "We discuss how Two-Eyed Seeing can bring breadth of knowledge and humility to the development of research and clinical practices for brain health. "
#science #philsci
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08437-2
NatureTwo-Eyed Seeing and other Indigenous perspectives for neuroscience - NatureCombining Indigenous insights with neuroscience methods through Two-Eyed Seeing can broaden the understanding of brain function and mental wellbeing by merging reductionist and holistic perspectives across various domains, while promoting allyship, humility and inclusive communication.
There is a steady stream of papers on incorporating indigenous science into Western knowledge systems. Here's one and a shout out to one of the authors who is my nephew!
#science #anthropology #philsci
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn5616
New Paper Out!
Probabilistic Empiricism, by M. Suarez and myself, examines how probabilistic models representing objective propensities can be confirmed by induction on situations.
Now open access at EJPS
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-025-00653-5
The article is based on a fruitful combination of our past work: Mauricio's s Complex Nexus of Chance on the complicated relations between frequencies, probabilities and dispositions, and my Modal Empiricism on the epistemology of modalities.
SpringerLinkProbabilistic empiricism - European Journal for Philosophy of ScienceModal Empiricism in philosophy of science proposes to understand the possibility of modal knowledge from experience by replacing talk of possible worlds with talk of possible situations, which are coarse-grained, bounded and relative to background conditions. This allows for an induction towards objective necessity, assuming that actual situations are representative of possible ones. The main limitation of this epistemology is that it does not account for probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose to extend Modal Empiricism to the probabilistic case, thus providing an inductivist epistemology for probabilistic knowledge. The key idea is that extreme probabilities, close to 1 and 0, serve as proxies for testing mild probabilities, using a principle of model combination.