philosophy-of-science

This paper argues that evolution is not a biological mechanism but a universal operator: a substrate‑independent process that transforms undifferentiated possibility into coherent, self‑maintaining form. The operator has a stable, domain‑invariant structure—variation, selection, and retention—and this structure appears across physical, chemical, biological, cognitive, cultural, and technological …

I'm reading Feyerabend's Against Method. I've read Kuhn's Structure and am familiar with Lakatos and Popper. What comes next though? I want to know the current state of this line of thinking, but I ...

A state-primitive ontology can reach retained inner asymmetry without yet reaching hosted internal organization. Retained inner asymmetry preserves a line-specific inner/outer difference through bounded local persistence, but it does not yet govern admissible internal participation. It does not explain how effects, alterations, perturbations, materials, records, damages, repairs, or prior consequ…

This treatise presents a novel metaphysical framework that grounds ontology in what the author terms "Atomic Distinction"—the foundational operation of declaring a thing's whole identity. Departing from standard cosmological arguments that terminate at a logical first cause, this work introduces the concept of a "Data Boundary" (I4.1): a rigorously defined point where internally derived data is e…

This paper investigates how a state-primitive constitutive ontology bears on existing scientific, philosophical, formal, social, computational, technological, institutional, archival, memorial, cognitive, and theoretical frameworks. It does not argue that mature theories should be discarded, that empirical science should be replaced, that mathematical formalism should be reduced to speculative me…

This article presents a historical-philosophical reconstruction of the function of the Absolute in Western thought. Its aim is not to provide an exhaustive history of doctrines of the Absolute, nor to revive a traditional metaphysics of ultimate ground. Instead, it asks what work the concept of the Absolute has performed across different epochs, and why this function persists even when the word “…

We investigate whether free will can be defined and derived as a structural consequence of a fully closed variational framework. Starting exclusively from the Ψ–Γ functional, its stationary equation, its dynamical equation, and the global decisional selection functional, we construct the complete solution space ( S = {\Psi \mid \delta S = 0} ) and the admissible domain ( A \subset S ). The spectr…

This paper demonstrates that any single-layer deterministic ontology — most prominently the 4D block-universe model — generates an epistemological self-refutation when applied to evolutionary processes. Human scientific knowledge is necessarily retrospective: it is constructed exclusively from realized (past) nodes within a stratified architecture. While this “rear-view mirror” methodology is rel…

One of Leibniz’s fundamental philosophical commitments is the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). Yet Leibniz’s precise understanding of this principle is elusive.  Leibniz provides several seemingly different formulations of its content, and Leibniz sometimes seems to require the PSR being metaphysically necessary and sometimes being metaphysically contingent.  I argue that these puzzles [...]

This paper argues that probabilistic structure should not be treated as ontologically primitive. Instead, probability is defined relative to conditions of recordability: it organizes spaces of possible records rather than properties of events as such. The analysis distinguishes between events, records, and probabilistic structures, and shows that probability acquires meaning only when stable, dis…

Science is valuable because it is civilization’s way of turning Reality into survivable models. At the most basic level, every living thing is already doing a primitive version of science. A bacterium “tests” chemical gradients. An animal learns where food is. A child touches something hot and updates the model. A hunter learns tracks, weather, seasons, and animal behavior. A farmer learns soil, …

Every theory of change — in physics, biology, organizational science, philosophy, or design — operates on a silent assumption: that the systems it describes persist through the transformations it analyzes. None of these theories derives the condition under which this persistence holds. La Profilée (LP) derives that condition from first principles. Starting from the minimal requirements that make …

_Philosophy of Science_. forthcomingA central finding of social epistemology is that phenomena desirable at the individual level might have hidden undesirable effects that emerge on the social level. These emergent effects have important implications for the management of values in science. Using a historical case study of the safety of hormonal pregnancy tests, I argue that the meta-analysis of …

Heidegger AI Textual Research Investigations: The Event Das Ereignis (GA 71). By Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Copyright©2026 Daniel Fidel Ferrer. All rights reserved. Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND. Imprint 1.0. 2026. WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) digital. 1-271 pages. Warning. Warning: this is an AI Working Zone. Warning. Perhaps an impending danger of unexpected, unknown texts. This is a…

In Socratically: A Festschrift in Honor of Claudio de Almeida. Porto Alegre: PUCRS University Press [EDIPUCRS]. 2021

_Australasian Philosophical Review_. forthcomingI build on Elizabeth Anderson’s account of local knowledge by defending a stronger relation between mētis and technē (Dependency). According to Dependency, the production of technē depends essentially on mētis. I argue for the stronger relation by appealing to the circulatory model of knowledge production from the history and philosophy of science. …

I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this causal entropy cannot decrease from a robust cause to its effect. Due to its analogy with the second laws of thermodynamics and statistical physics, I call the latt…

We propose a parsimonious non-dual ontological framework in which the observable universe emerges as the continuous, simultaneous radiation and reabsorption of distinction from an undifferentiated pri- mordial ground state. This ground state is defined solely by its existence; no properties, time, location, or internal structure are attributed to it. All established physical laws — including the …

This note is a developmental orientation to the identity-persistence program. It is not part of the formal proof stack and does not introduce additional ontological, physical, biological, computational, or metaphysical claims. Its purpose is to explain how an earlier coherence-oriented lens was narrowed into the current formal problem: what must remain invariant for something to persist as the sa…

Abstract An apparent issue for the Revision Theory of definitions has long been that its most plausible versions engender $\omega $-inconsistencies. In this paper I develop a new $\omega $-consistent revision theory and use it to argue that revision theorists can and should embrace $\omega $-consistency. I show how my theory, called $\mathbf{S}^{\#N}$, withstands the theoretical pressures towards…