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Digging, Sowing, Building
Published in Evelyn Brister, Robert Frodeman, A Guide to Field Philosophy, 2020
Evelyn Brister, Robert Frodeman
Because field philosophy theorizes from real situations, it avoids some of the pitfalls of ideal theory and of philosophical thought experiments based on intuition. Ideal theory and thought experiment both have their place in philosophy, but they have also been criticized because they fail to take into account the complexity and constraints of real-life social, political, and physical systems. Charles Mills (2005) argues that political theory too often relies on idealization, to the point of marginalizing and ignoring urgent social concerns that lie outside the terms of the ideal, such as racism and other forms of oppression. By doing so, ideal theories tacitly support the ideologies of oppressive social systems. Philosophical thought experiments have been criticized on similar grounds: armchair theorizing overlooks the effects social systems have on the generation of philosophical intuitions (Schwartzman 2012). Thought experiments are useful for generating cases to consider, but they have less epistemic value than empirical examinations of existing systems (Häggqvist 2009). Examining philosophical issues in their natural habitat yields better philosophy and can have concrete results in the real world.
Experiments
Published in Patrick F. Dunn, Fundamentals of Sensors for Engineering and Science, 2019
An additional fifth category involves experiments that are far less common and lead to discovery. Discovery can be either anticipated by theory (an analytic discovery) such as the discovery of the quark, or serendipitous (a synthetic discovery) such as the discovery of bacterial repression by penicillin. There also are thought (gedunken or Kantian) experiments that are posed to examine what would follow from a conjecture. Thought experiments, according to our formal definition, are not experiments because they do not involve any physical change in the process.
Experiments
Published in Patrick F. Dunn, Michael P. Davis, Measurement and Data Analysis for Engineering and Science, 2017
Patrick F. Dunn, Michael P. Davis
An additional fifth category involves experiments that are far less common and lead to discovery. Discovery can be either anticipated by theory (an analytic discovery) such as the discovery of the quark, or serendipitous (a synthetic discovery) such as the discovery of bacterial repression by penicillin. There also are thought (gedunken or Kantian) experiments that are posed to examine what would follow from a conjecture. Thought experiments, according to our formal definition, are not experiments because they do not involve any physical change in the process.
Guided discovery of the nine-point circle theorem and its proof
Published in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 2018
In his influential book Proofs and Refutations – the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, Irme Lakatos [2] made a case against the rigid formalistic approach to mathematical proofs. Lakatos viewed a proof as an entity which grows out of an empirical investigation and develops alongside it, gradually becoming more precise and rigorous. The initial proof has a status of a conjecture or a thought experiment. The original conjecture is broken down into a collection of sub-conjectures or lemmas, each of which can be then examined and refined separately, ultimately contributing to clarification of the concepts involved and to the development of the proof. This process is, by definition, non-linear, and requires attending to different parts of proof separately, treating some of the lemmas as temporary results that can be addressed – proved or possibly replaced – in the later stages of the proving process. This approach aims to simplify the proving process, but it also raises an important question of how can one successfully keep track of all the intermediate results and of the proof as a whole?
On high stiffness of soft robots for compatibility of deformation and function
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2022
Keisuke Hagiwara, Ko Yamamoto, Yoshihisa Shibata, Mitsuo Komagata, Yoshihiko Nakamura
In this paper, in order to find the conditions for achieving high stiffness in a soft robot, we focus on the fluid. Figure 2 shows a schematic illustration of the thought experiment. A spherical shell made with a soft material is sandwiched by two rigid plates, where the lower plate is fixed. We assume that inner pressure is applied to the shell or that a fluid is filled inside the shell. Then, we apply a force to the upper plate and measure the deformation of the shell in the vertical direction, which is calculated by the finite element analysis (FEA). Although this is a simple simulation, it is a model of a fluid-driven soft robot that supports a load, and we can estimate the potential stiffness.