All possible pro and con arguments regarding the theory of evolution have been discussed and debated in the vast literature-scientific, religious, and lay-in the past 150 years. There is usually great zealotry in all debating parties, with mutual intolerance of ideas and concepts, disrespect toward opposing opinions and positions, and usage of very harsh language. This prejudiced approach usual...

Today we will finish developing a tester for dictator functions and then explore connections of this test (and the linearity test discussed last lecture) with error correcting codes and probabilisti-cally checkable proofs. In the last lecture, we introduced and analyzed a local tester for linearity and began to reverse engineer how it could be modified to yield a test for dictatorships. Recall ...

In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). Yagisawa draws interesting parallels between tense and modality, and gives a metaphysics of modality which comes close t...

There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity, are false if taken together and literally. If they are in fact false, then how should they count as providing knowledge of the physical world? One might imagine that, while strictly false, our best physical theories are nevertheless in some sense probably approximately true. This paper pre...