Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 07 – 07 Readers familiar with both the history of philosophy and the history of science often notice a striking difference in the way these disciplines are commonly presented. Histories of philosophy frequently appear as continuous conversations extending across centuries. Plato proposes an idea; Aristotle develops or criticizes it;Continue reading “Excursus 107 – Continuity, Rupture, and Conflict in the History of Ideas”
Tag Archives: paradigms
Excursus 065 – On the Ripley Principle: The Evolution of Ideas
Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18 Scientific and philosophical ideas rarely emerge in their final form. Their first appearance is often incomplete, imprecise, or even misleading. Concepts are proposed, criticized, revised, abandoned, reformulated, and sometimes rediscovered under new names. What later generations recognize as a successful theory is frequently the result ofContinue reading “Excursus 065 – On the Ripley Principle: The Evolution of Ideas”
Excursus 049 – On Peripheral Innovation
Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18 Biological evolution and intellectual history exhibit a striking structural parallel. In evolutionary biology, new species rarely arise within the large, stable center of a population, where continual interbreeding tends to preserve existing forms. Instead, significant evolutionary divergence often begins in small, geographically or reproductively isolated populationsContinue reading “Excursus 049 – On Peripheral Innovation”
Excursus 048 – On Insiders and Outsiders in Scientific Innovation
Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18 Scientific knowledge depends upon institutions. Universities, academies, journals, and professional societies preserve standards of evidence, refine methods, and transmit accumulated understanding from one generation to the next. Without such institutions, science could neither maintain continuity nor achieve collective progress. Yet the same institutions that preserve knowledgeContinue reading “Excursus 048 – On Insiders and Outsiders in Scientific Innovation”
Excursus 037 – On Hope and Despair in Scientific Inquiry
Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30 Bacon’s warning against the “supposition of impossibility” speaks directly to a recurring problem in scientific inquiry: the tendency to dismiss certain questions or lines of investigation as inherently unanswerable before they have been adequately explored. His remedy was not unqualified optimism but what he called “trueContinue reading “Excursus 037 – On Hope and Despair in Scientific Inquiry”
Excursus 020 – On Communication across Paradigms
Hossein Jorjani First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30 The phenomenon of conceptual scaffolding may be clarified by analogy with coordinate transformations in linear algebra. When moving from one coordinate system to another, a point or vector is represented differently according to the basis in use. To understand the new representation, one must initially mapContinue reading “Excursus 020 – On Communication across Paradigms”
Hossein Jorjani 