Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap

…. Or, visit your local University’s library for an even grander selection. Buy very, very cheap books. Ok, so this one’s almost free. There are hundreds of books selling at less than 1 cent on Amazon. They’re not all worth a penny, but there are some real jewels among the noise, which you can get for only the price of shipping. To find them, try browsing by subject, and then selecting “Sort by Price: Low to High.” Reading With Questionable Scruple…

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Special: What’s With the Economy.

…erBee first became a restaurant. They wanted to buy a building to make and sell burgers in. The wealthy Scrooge McDuck had enough money to buy buildings. So they struck the following deal. McDuck gave BurgerBee the money to buy a building for their burger joint (say, 100,000 dollars). In return, BurgerBee gave McDuck a little certificate, which says that BurgerBee will pay McDuck MUCH MORE than the original amount (say, 200,000 dollars). But the p…

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Accuracy, Applicability, and Tarskian Semantics

…a of truth itself. Truth is just the notion that specific instances of the generic form of semantics I oppose most commonly employ in their respective foundations—that genus of semantics that attributes semantic content to a theoretical representation based on the accuracy of the fit of its predictions to the results of the empirical, quantitative measurements made on the system it purports to model. In other words, my argument is with accounts of…

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Improving the Peer Review Process

…even be willing to pay a submission fee for this cause, if it improves the quality and timeliness of the report (I know I would!). Journals in many disciplines, including philosophy and HPS, could immediately adopt the first idea to great benefit. The second idea requires some structural changes to raise the funds. To this end, I’d only suggest: Stop printing paper-copies of journals. It’s a waste of money. Everybody prefers to access articles ele…

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Hyper-intelligent fish and black hole thermodynamics

…though black holes remain outside our reach. But does evidence for a sound-based analogue somehow provide us evidence about a real black hole? I see no plausible way that it can. Although a black hole is mathematically similar to a “dumb hole,” it is not the same thing. And history has something to teach us here: gas and fluid vortices are “mathematically similar” to Descartes’ aether vortices. But experiments with the former do not provide eviden…

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