Religion
Davide Cantoni, a Harvard graduate student in economics deals a deadly blow to Max Weber’s theory that Protestantism favours economic development.
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Principle that to be meaningful a sentence or proposition must be either verifiable by means of the five senses or a tautology of logic. TTie verifiability might be required in practice or (more usually) in principle, and might need to be conclusive (strong verifiability) or could be merely partial (weak...
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Theory developed by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) to deal with paradoxes like his paradox of classes: is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves a member of itself? If yes, no; if no, yes. Russell said there is no such class. Classes (and also properties) cannot all be lumped together,...
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Form of IDEALISM espoused by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who called himself a transcendental idealist but an empirical realist. He meant, roughly, that what we experience can only be representations, not things in themselves, of which we can know nothing except that they must exist in order to ground...
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Semantic concept formalized by the Polish-American mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1902-83), although other thinkers had previously discussed the idea. Truth theory concerns the truth-values of sentence structures in various formal logical languages. Tarski suggested a table by which these...
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Proposed by Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), a physiologist and physician who was associated with the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The concept that all the activities of animals and humans are determined by tropisms, just as plant movements are determined by tropisms. Loeb believed that matters of the...
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Theory that if we are correctly said to remember some fact or event (as against releaming it, guessing it, and so on) there must be some physiologically identifiable trace in the brain which carried the information in question right through from the time when we first learnt it. The trace need not...
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Named after a fictional character created by English author Lawrence Sterne (1713-68). Shandy finds that in two years of writing he has covered two days of his autobiography and doubts whether he will ever complete the work. However, even at that poor rate he could finish the work provided that he had...
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Primarily an idea developed by the Hungarian social philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976). Starting from such facts as our ability to recognize faces without knowing how we do so, and to be trained in a psychological laboratory to respond to certain perceived stimuli without knowing just what it...
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A theory originally developed by English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), this asserts that actions and institutions should be judged by their contribution to utility, which is measured by calculating the relative contribution to happiness or pleasure, as opposed to pain. The aim of...
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Any of a variety of views all of which are consequentialist or teleological, being distinguished from other forms of CONSEQUENTIALISM (if any) by saying that the consequence to be pursued is the maximization of good. This maximization may refer to the greatest total good or the greatest average good,...
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Traditional name for the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle, regarded as being particularly basic to thinking. The three laws are no longer singled out in quite this way. The law of excluded middle is subject to dispute (and also to a variant form, the law of BIVALENCE), and even the...
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Theories springing mainly from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), that the meaning of a word or sentence is to be sought in its use, not in its correspondence to some entity (as NAMING and CORRESPONDENCE THEORIES of MEANING in general imply). The use in question normally means actual usage, but may also...
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One of a group of arguments presented by Plato (C.427-C.347 BC) in his dialogue Parmenides (131e-3a) in apparent criticism of PLATO'S THEORY OF FORMS. Briefly, the argument might be put as follows. If a man is made to be what he is by participating in a Platonic Form (though Greek did not distinguish...
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A complex and controversial notion which has been used both to distinguish the moral from the nonmoral and to distinguish the moral from the immoral - two jobs which tend to get in each other's way. 'What if everyone did that?' is often a relevant question in moral contexts; but 'did what exactly?'....
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Term used - usually in its adjectival forms: universalist(ic) - as a contrast term to EGOISM and ALTRUISM when referring to UTILITARIANISM and similar topics. It is summed up in the slogan of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), 'Everyone to count for one and no-one for more than one'. ARL
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A claim that may be offered as a grounding for the INDUCTIVE PRINCIPLE, though it is not always distinguished from the principle itself. It may be crudely formulated as 'Nature is uniform', or 'The future will resemble the past', or - in a more refined version like that given under inductive principle...
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The religious belief that God is the creator of and supreme authority in the universe. In most major religions God is a beneficent being (or beings) with a particular sympathy for mankind, which owes him an allegiance of obedience and worship. Philosophical objections to the idea include: the conflict...
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In general, belief in or appeal to explanation in terms of ends or purposes. As an ethical doctrine teleology claims that our duties are specifiable in terms of the production of some value. Teleology is perhaps rather wider than CONSEQUENTIALISM as it includes such views as that an act is our duty if...
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Principle that there must be a sufficient reason - causal or otherwise - for why whatever exists or occurs does so, and does so in the place, time and manner that it does. The principle goes back to at least the early 5th century BC - being used by Parmenides (see ELEATICISM) in his Fragment 8, lines...
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Theories which analyze probability in terms of beliefs or attitudes rather than anything in the world itself. For one theory, associated mainly with Bruno De Finetti (1906-85), the degree of probability of something is the degree of the speaker's belief, measured by his betting behaviour, but subject...
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Turns out, the meteorite that supposedly killed the dinosaurs may have been 300,000 years late.
Human motivation exists in a five-tiered structure. The five tiers from lowest to highest are sociological needs, personal security needs, social needs, esteem needs and the penultimate need: self-actualization.
Great man creat history through their actions, leadership, art, and innovation. At least, Carlyle thought so in the 19th century.
Want to know the secret to personalities and personal success? Use hair part theory. It worked for Margaret Thatcher.
A theory developed by Pavlov that shows one can change a stimulus part of a stimulus-response pattern (like a flinch from a loud noise) to something neutral (a blue light turning on) and generate the same response. In this example, the blue light could cause the subject to flinch.
The explanation for 'Lost' is Jason Hunter's Time Loop theory. But you have to see it to really get it.
The island used to be connected to the rest of the Earth, but was detached during electromagnetism experiments conducted by the Dharma Initiative. It is capable of traveling anywhere with the only parameter being gravity
The most widespread and enduring conspiracy theories—British intelligence killed Princess Diana, the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11—are completely absurd. But that doesn’t stop them from drawing a vast and vehement audience. David Aaronovitch picks apart 12 grand conspiracy theories to conclude that they are concocted and promoted, in large part, by educated losers. (Yes, he actually calls them losers.)
'Gravity' hints at the passion behind Newton's theoriesDetroit Free PressBY JOHN MONAGHAN It's an image planted in the mind of every schoolkid: Isaac Newton sits beneath an apple tree as a shiny red orb bonks him on the noggin. ... ABC's Lost: Lighthouse Episode Recap & TheoriesMetrowny.com...
Now that they've had two days to think about it, what can the Internet's brainiest 'Lost' theorists tell us about the show's final season?
Inflation theory, which posits that the universe ballooned from subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball during its first 10-33 seconds, has had great ...
There are a million different ingenious theories out there that explain this or that certain phenomenon and many are very complicated. See which one are surfacing on the interwebs today.
Nick Jonas (and the Administration) has just released a new song and it's called "Conspiracy Theory."
Listen to the newest single from his upcoming album "Who I Am" below:
Amateur historian Rick Rogers has spent decades developing a theory that either Dutch or Spanish traders visited Hawaii before Captain Cook's 1778 arrival. Maps from 1589 showing an approximation of Hawaii's shape and location; remains of a 1664 women indicating she had syphilis and the disappearance of 5 Spanish ships plying the Manila to Acapulco trade in the 1500 and 1600s make his case.
Scholars at the global warming skeptics thinktank, "The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI)" say ocean acidification theory is a scare tactic ignores Cambrian data, the chemistry of CO2 and the alkaline affect of ocean rocks.
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