315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2025
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: apples fall downward from trees. But how can you really know? After all, tomorrow you might see an apple that falls upward. How is science possible at all? Philosophers, as you might expect, have thought hard about this. Branden Fitelson explains how a better understanding of probability can help us decide when new evidence is actually confirming our beliefs.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/05/19/315-branden-fitelson-on-the-logic-and-use-of-probability/
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Branden Fitelson received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. He is a co-founder of the Formal Epistemology Workshop, and winner of the 2020 Wolfram Innovator Award.
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| 0:00.0 | What happens now? |
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| 1:18.1 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things |
| 1:22.7 | that I always like to say about science and how it gets done is that science never proves things. This is something |
| 1:30.3 | that is an important feature of science, especially in the modern world, where what science does, |
| 1:36.7 | how it reaches conclusions, how trustworthy it is, these are all under contestation by different parts |
| 1:43.3 | of society. So it's important to understand what science is and how it actually reaches its conclusions. And the claim that science never proves things, which is something that most scientists would go along with me on, comes from a comparison to real proof in mathematics or for that matter in logic. |
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