This commentary argues that to fully appreciate the complexities of knowledge transfer one firstly has to distinguish between the notions of “data, information, knowledge and wisdom,” and that the latter two are highly context sensitive. In particular one has to understand knowledge as being personal rather than objective, and hence there is no form of knowledge that a-priori is more authoritat...

There are four approaches to analyzing the concept of a priori knowledge. The primary target of the reductive approach is the concept of a priori justification. The primary target of the nonreductive approach is the concept of a priori knowledge. There are two approaches to analyzing each primary target. A theory-neutral approach provides an analysis that does not presuppose any general theory ...

Consider a complete graph G = (V,E), in which each node is present with probability pi. We are interested in solving combinatorial optimization problems on subsets of nodes present with a certain probability. We introduce the idea of a priori optimization as a strategy competitive to the strategy of re-optimization, under which the combinatorial optimization problem is solved optimally for ever...

I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary. The discussion...

ance. Thus Michael Kohlhaas, in the novella of the same name (1810), becomes inhuman in his pursuit of justice; and the heroines of Kleist’s plays Penthesilea (1808) and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810) become inhuman in their pursuit of love—one by being totally aggressive, the other by being totally submissive. In his last play, Der Prinz von Homburg (1810), Kleist attempted to oppose the or...

Part of the scientific enterprise is to measure the material world and to explain its dynamics by means of models. However, not only is measurability of the world limited, analyzability of models is so, too. Most often, computer simulations offer a way out of this epistemic bottleneck. They instantiate the model and may help to analyze it. In relation to the material world a simulation may be r...