Bartosz Michał Radomski

The claim that the free energy principle is somehow related to Hamilton’s principle in statistical mechanics is ubiquitous throughout the subject literature. However, the exact nature of this relationship remains unclear. According to some sources, the free energy principle is merely similar to Hamilton’s principle of stationary action; others claim that it is either analogous or equivalent to it, while yet another part of the literature espouses the claim that it is a version of Hamilton’s principle. In this article, we aim to clarify the nature of the relationship between the two principles by investigating the two most likely interpretations of the claims that can be found in the subject literature. According to the strong interpretation, the two principles are equivalent and apply to the same subset of physical phenomena; according to the weak interpretation, the two principles are merely analogous to each other by virtue of their similar formal structures. As we show, adopting the stronger reading would lead to a dilemma that is untenable for the proponents of the free energy principle, thus supporting the adoption of the weaker reading for the relationship between the two constructs.

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori – the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the methodof digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science.

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori—the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science.