AW! Epistles
From Karl 7
Abstract
Monday, 18 July 2005
Anyway, for now at least, I would like to move on from discussion of the great imponderables back to our discussion about the nature of science.
“I think you are right in much of what you say here but we differ mainly on attitude—is the pint of cider half full or half empty?—effectively. We are making assumptions in doing science and I rejoice that we seem to be learning so much that is of practical value in understanding the world, whereas you seem to view the scientific “experiment” much more negatively.”
We have a difference in attitude about science. So what? As I have already pointed out, the main focus of my criticism of science is the scientific realist interpretation of science as providing knowledge of a mind-independent reality that remains untransformed by our interactions with it.
Certainly it is, but that is your opinion, and one that you accept is unverifiable or unfalsifiable. Moreover, you still think that science is useful, even though it is not what scientists think they are doing. Your criticism therefore gets a bit like some people’s belief in God. It makes you feel better that you know the truth, but it has no practical consequences.
“…but you have no criteria for testing your jaundiced one, as you have admitted.”
My jaundiced view is as testable as your rosy view. The test is whether science makes human life better or worse and (even though will be both probably be dead long before then) if physics hits a dead end, with more questions unanswered than answered, then it has failed.
If it is for the reason you give, it has, but I do not really think that physics will ever answer all the questions that can be put to it, even if the scientific view is correct, at least until we become gods. Discovery of the way Nature works might precede godhead or extinction.
“Why does it not apply to knowledge produced in some other way than scientific realism, say revelation? Or say, Platonism, or Aristotelianism, or Feyerabendism, or Derridaism, or even Rogersism? All knowledge that is passed from its originator to others is separated from the way it was produced and so must be unintelligible, according to this precept.”
This is simply erroneous. I said that we needed to understand the context in which knowledge was produced and the being for whom it was intelligible as knowledge in order for that knowledge to be intelligible. It does not follow that any knowledge articulated in the works of Plato, for example (say Socrates knowledge that the only thing that he knows is that he knows nothing), is unintelligible as knowledge merely because Socrates is dead and nobody else is Socrates. You are just being silly. What I am saying is that you have to understand the context within which Socrates could make that knowledge claim in order for that claim to be intelligible. We have to empathise with Socrates, as a human being, in the light of his situation, as it is described in the dialogues, in order to make sense of his knowledge claim to know nothing. What I am saying about scientific knowledge is that it has to be understood in technological context as a form of knowledge that is intelligible to a group of human beings, trained and educated in particular ways, within particular societies and cultures, in order for that knowledge to be intelligible as knowledge. What the scientific realist does is abstract that knowledge out of context in order to represent it as objective knowledge of a human-independent reality. In order to understand how that move was possible and meaningful, one needs to situate scientific realism into historical context. But, the reason why I am particularly critical of scientific realism is that its reification of knowledge is something which makes it less meaningful and possibly is an obstacle for understanding the reality that sciences such as physics explore.
You say it is erroneous then repeat it. I quoted what you said which was “we cannot separate the being for which knowledge is intelligible from the way that knowledge is produced, without making that knowledge completely unintelligible as knowledge”, and your further explanation of it is “knowledge that is intelligible to a group of human beings, trained and educated in particular ways, within particular societies and cultures, in order for that knowledge to be intelligible as knowledge”, and “you have to understand the context within which Socrates could make that knowledge claim in order for that claim to be intelligible”. It applies, just as I said it does, to all knowledge, including Rogersism. As for being silly, it is something I often am. I always felt silly addressing crowds of people, yet it is something that Mr Bush and Mr Blair seem to enjoy immensely and do not think is silly at all, not least because they get a lot of wealth out of it directly and indirectly. So, I am quite proud of being silly in this way, if no other. In fact, it is self evident that we can never know what Socrates precisely meant when he uttered his aphorism, simple though it is. What is certain is that he did not mean it to be literally true. Socrates knew a great deal. I take it to mean that no one—even he—can ever know much of what there is to know, and that, I think, is what most scientists think too, though there are some with egos bigger than a prophet’s. Now, while your ’scientific realists’ do claim to be finding out things about objective reality, the context they take it out of, in your presentation of it, is not a singular one. The point of it is that an actual phenomenon of Nature will be found in different contexts, and its properties would generally have to be consistent from one context to the next. It is something you have a lot of difficulty with in your own theory because you have to posit transferability of these phenomena as objects along the ’genetic lines’ of, or—in case the genes cannot ensure it—across the ’boundaries’ between, machine families. This confusions serves as an argument. The ’scientific realist’ explanation is not seriously challenged by all this verbiage.
“If ’physics is only a way of understanding that is dependent on the presumption that it is good for us to understand the world in this way’, what form of knowledge is not dependent on this presumption? Even theologians have now decided that theology is corrigible, having discovered that to pretend it is revealing fixed and eternal truths leaves religionist open to ridicule, and so that too is deferred to some future state of perfection—heaven, no doubt… Revelation and theology cannot be thus reduced, nor the work of all of those philosophers. Rogersism is a way of understanding that is bad for us? One case, at least, is anecdotal evidence that in Rogersism ‘we cannot separate the being for which knowledge is intelligible from the way that knowledge is produced, without making that knowledge completely unintelligible as knowledge’, though that case can be explained in other ways such as poor reading and comprehension through neglecting to hone the philosophic X-ray intellect.”
My point is that the scientific realist interpretation ignores that physics is premised upon its claim to be good for us to understand the world in technological terms. Hence scientific realists claim that physics is value neutral—when the reality of how physics is really done is quite different from the imagined and abstract science of the scientific realists. The trajectory and content of physics is inherently built upon value judgements. My critical point is that both positivists and scientific realists have misunderstood experimental physics. It doesn’t require an X-ray vision to find this explicitly stated and oft argued for in my book.
All right, but whether science is based on scientific realism or machine modelling, I still maintain that what is done is not a decision of the scientists or machine moulders, but is a bribe offered by aggrandizers and governments. They dangle the cash for their indecent proposals, and inevitably volunteers appear willing to prostitute their skills. The change needed is for society only to have decent proposals for science.
“I pointed out that alethic was not defined as you claimed—and it was not, as such—simply because of your high handed manner about the meaning of these words which you use as part of a technical jargon which is far from familiar to most people. I noted in my reply that you had a section explaining terms in your book, but the specific adjectives we are speaking about do not appear even though their nouns do. My central point was about what we understand by these words, and that philosophers like to redefine them to suit themselves. It means an effort has to be made to forget the meaning normally understood, and plainly I have not made enough of an effort on a first reading such as you people of X-ray intellect obviously expect… Since you invited me to reach for a dictionary, I did and find that the ones I used do not give the definitions that you have for some of these words, even when they are defined. The OED refers it to the Greek for knowledge, adding ‘degree of acceptance’, and the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (OCTP) has it as pertaining to what is ‘rationally worthy of belief’. This definition is obviously the one that scientists accept. You chose to say that experimental knowledge is alethic knowledge and this is not true knowledge as it seems to be from the words but less than true knowledge because it is qualified in some way that I will discover when I read the book. All I am saying here is that the jargon you use is not user friendly in the sense that its meaning leaps at you from the words you use. Continuing to do what you urged me to do, I looked up the meanings of the words you list in Honderich’s OCTP to find that nousic knowledge and phronetic knowledge might even be better terms for what you are distinguishing because nous refers to a rationality capable of grasping the fundamentals of reality while phronesis refers to the practical intellect. Anyway, the only seed of life this discussion has is that, notwithstanding your explanatory section, a book like yours that uses a vocabulary replete with jargon ought to have a glossary in which your own definitions of these words are given rather than leaving it to the reader to check them by re-reading your text or using an external reference that might merely add to the reader’s confusion.”
I don’t know which dictionary you use, but I use the phrase alethic modality in my book according to the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary, and the Collins Dictionary. This definition is stated in the text. I have also checked an online dictionary, which provides an in depth definition of the phrase alethic modality. This definition is consistent with the usage in my book, but goes into greater detail and compares it with other types of modal logic. Check it out:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/modal+logic
However, my version of the Oxford Etymological Dictionary defines episteme as the Greek word for science. Which is reasonable because it seems that the Greeks had many different words for differnt types of knowledge. My definitions of techne and episteme start with the OED and then are elaborated in relation to the works of Plato and Aristotle. These are widely considered to be acceptable sources for the definition of these words. It seems to me to be more than reasonable to use the adjective form of a word without further clarification once one has defined the noun. My definitions of these words were not idiosyncratic and it struck me that it was you who was being particularly high handed when you claimed that I was redefining words to suit my purposes to fit square pegs into round holes. In my view, you simply misunderstood (or even missed) the definitions that are clearly stated in the text before they are used in the argument. You jumped the gun. It is not a case of requiring X-ray vision, it is merely the case that you need to read more carefully, especially when the text uses words that you are unfamiliar with. I appreciate your point about a glossary, but the book does come with an index and I was limited to 100K word count. It seems to me that phrases such as “rationally worthy of belief” and “degree of acceptance” would not only be very poor definitions of knowledge, but are extremely ambiguous and are not used in my OED. But I do not own the OCP, so I can’t comment on its definition, but it seems to me to be quite strange to say that knowledge was rationally worthy of belief. One does not believe what one knows. One can only believe what one considers to be true but does not know to be true. And only a social constructionist or relativist would say that knowledge was based on a degree of acceptance. For a realist or rationalist, knowledge is based on truth and degrees of acceptance do not establish truth. It seems to me that most scientists would agree that degrees of acceptance and belief occur in the absence of knowledge. I am not familiar with Honderich’s OCTP, but according to my copy of the OED, the translators notes in my complete works of Plato, and Aristotle’s Ethics, nous refers to an intuitive understanding of truth (rather than rational understanding of reality). It is what we moderns would call intuitive common sense (having nous) and in Yiddish is called moxie, hence Kant described the reality which we must intuitively know to exist even if we cannot experience it as noumenal. And phronesis means “practical wisdom” which refers to the ability to know in context what the right thing to do is and in Aristotle’s Ethics it was the knowledge of how to act with virtue. Whilst scientists may well use intuition in their work, it is not the same as episteme, which contrary to your definition, is the knowledge of necessary and universal causes or principles, and it certainly is not the same as techne which is the knowledge of the causal principles involved in making. Both of these were defined at length in chapter 1. But Techne and phronesis could only be considered to be the same within a technological society that considered technical excellence to be the highest virtue.
My point was to show that simply using dictionaries when you are using jargon words with specific unfamilar meanings is inadequate, and, while I accept your explanation for not being able to fit in a glossary, it is a good idea. I accept the criticism that I should have read the book more carefully, but still contend that you were not as thorough as you think in defining your terms, and you will, perhaps, since you do not aim to seem arrogant, allow for the fact that you have devoted several years of your life to this subject, while I am reading it for the first time. that is why I am being sarcastic in speaking of your X-ray intellect. For the rest of your reply, you are criticizing the compilers of the dictionaries, not me. I am the humble user of the tools these etymologists hand me. I referred to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989) which has no definition of techne or aletheia or alethic, let alone alethic modality, at all. They are not, of course, English words, and, though they are used in English, they are plainly too specialised for a general dictionary even when it has 20,000 pages. It does have episteme and epistemic with their Greek source defined as knowledge. Phronesis is in, defined as intellect, and nous, defined as mind. Anyway, as I said, there is not much life in this seed.
“I try to substitute paraphrased expressions for your ones, actual knowledge being that knowledge of eternal and necessary principles that science is not discovering, and humanly determined knowledge, that imperfect knowledge that science, a human mode of disclosure, discloses as the truth.”
Episteme is an ideal knowledge—it is not achieved through physics, but aspired towards—so is not actual knowledge. My argument is that the type of knowledge achieved by experimental physics is alethic knowledge. This would be actual knowledge. And imperfect, for a scientific realist.
But I am a scientific ’realist’, you keep telling me, and so cannot accept any such thing as an ideal. Actual knowledge is knowledge that can be had about reality. Whether it can be had through physics or not is the point of this discussion. Ideal knowledge definitely cannot be had through physics.
“I know you are not making the claim that all human knowledge is alethic. I said that if the features that I picked out from what you wrote were features of the alethic character of knowledge, then they seem to be more general than just experimental science. As for mathematics, the whole vast bulk that it now comprises began with direct experience of counting sheep and goats, measuring volumes of wheat and the size of plots of land, and eventually the weights of precious metals. From these actions came arithmetic and geometry, and once these had started it logic continued it.”
Yes. But there is a lot more to mathematics than arithmetic and geometry. There are many aspects of number theory (complex numbers and irrational numbers), set theory, series theory, group theory, topology, etc., that are based on the internal rules of mathematics and are not empirically based or tested.
Once the arithmetic and geometry started it, the rest followed from our neural architecture which has eolved to fit us to living in reality (as we have already discussed), and their continued use in solving actual problems.
“But since mathematics describes the machines that you consider simply artefacts as well as many natural phenomena like population dynamics, growth spirals and myriads of other natural phenomena, it seems less obtuse to me to consider that the mathematics represent some sort of reality behind the snapshot pictures we call experiments and observations.”
That is exactly the metaphysical leap that I am talking about! Of course it is possible to describe features of natural shapes, changes, and patterns in terms of mathematics, but why does it follow from any predictive accuracy of this method that “mathematics represents some sort of reality behind the snapshot pictures we call experiments and observations”. That is something that you have added on to the experience. Moreover, as I argue in chapter 2, scientific theory aims at explaining phenomena in terms of causal accounts. Mathematics can only describe relations, it does not describe causes.
Science does both. It cannot explain anything until it has described it adequately because its explanations cannot be adequately tested until it has. And while you say I am making some outrageous metaphysical leap, I think I am simply using my head to make an obvious deduction. When spirals seem ubiquitous in Nature, I think that natural processes are able to generate spirals, and spirals arise from the concatenation of certain relationships, described mathematically. If it is metaphysical then OK, but it seems to me to be nothing more than nous.
“It would not do to have the hypothesis of mechanical realism testable, otherwise it would be scientific.”
You’ve put the cart before the horse, mate! Mechanical realism is unscientific because it is not testable. Not the other way round.
My apology. I was using the ’hypothesis of mechanical realism’ to mean your own theory—as Rogers’ ’hypothesis of machine realism’, or whatever the proper expression for human modelling with machines is. Presumably with this correction it is true since the metaphysics still cannot test itself whatever it is.
“But the observational science do overlap, as you admit above, and we are back to the seamlessness of the overlap we have touched on earlier.”
Only if you slip the word seamlessness into it. Politics and economics overlap, but hardly in a seamless way.
Your analogy is poor. Many political scientists think politics and economics are the same subject, political economy, and have been artificially divided so that politics can be divorced from its cause, economics, to stop people from seeing embarrassing connexions. But I am not slipping seamless in as if it were a sneaky thing to do. I have referred before to the use of the wind. The mature dandelion grows seeds that the wind blows off to disperse. Is that a machine? When a peasant uses the wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, is he using a machine?
“You imply that these observational sciences become mechanically realist when they overlap, but an overlap without an obvious scar or fracture is most reasonably explained by the mechanics being a fair representation of Nature itself.”
Again, you are ignoring the context.
“Since mechanical realism has no testable consequences, I cannot see any incentive for anyone to stop believing it is revealing the workings of Nature, as science does at present.”
So you say. But is it true? I say maybe not. However, you object to this sort of “reasoning” when Christians do it. You argue that if Christianity has no testable consequences, then we do not have a reason to believe it. Make your mind up!
Well, I have done, but what I am saying is that you seem to destroy every basis for making your mind up about anything because everything depends upon metaphysical assumptions that are not testable. That being so, I and the Christians, are left where we were before you pointed this out to us. We decide on what we can do. Christians will arbitrarily believe in their figment and scientists will continue to believe in theirs. But scientific belief seems to do what scientists think it does, even though you maintain they are doing something else—though that remains useful! My mind remains made up about what I prefer even if my metaphysical assumptions are wrong since they are no more wrong than anyone else’s, including your own.
“If science is what it thinks it is, then periodically, it will reach a fracture zone where it cannot represent Nature adequately. The paradigm has to change, but eventually we shall perhaps not be able to go any further empirically. Philosophy then will resume its supremacy. We might be getting there. Much of cosmology seems to be speculation, and maybe quantum physics is getting to its limits too. Mechanical realism will always be true, being untestable!”
At last! But, my point is that the truth or falsehood of mechanical realism (like the existence or inexistence of God) is a matter of human decision. There is no archimedean point against which to weigh it. Science will end when human beings can’t go any further with it. Whether it makes us more knowledgeable or wiser is the $64,000 question.
Well, it is a question that it seems we cannot answer, if science is no more or less true than God, or any other system that can be devised based on other metaphysical assumptions. Since you have thrown us into the metaphysical ocean without a boat, we shall have to grab whatever we can, if we are practically minded, or pray, if we are religiously minded. I shall be grabbing at the flotsam. So, nothing has changed. If there is nothing better on offer, it is insane to want to change.
“Well, you have said that history was one of your early passions and it is by burrowing in the history of science that you have made your discoveries. Saying how might be the real value of what you have explored. Instead of seeing mechanical realism as a Chinese wall against science, if you saw it as a stepping stone in the evolution of science, something constructive might come of it. Otherwise it will stand as a speculative and untestable beef.”
As I have argued, my historical studies have come to the conclusion that in physics, the scientific method is a process of attempting to achieve the techne of Nature by modelling the contours between human interventions and machine performances.
“A human can keep the weather off by living in a cave, or by building a mud hut, or by building a concrete and glass skyscraper. The latter two are manufactured machines to live in.”
It is a bit of a definitional stretch to call buildings machines. But I agree that they are artificial.
Was it Le Corbusier or Buckminster Fuller who called them machines to live in?
“A cave only differs in not being manufactured.”
That’s quite a difference in my view. But, of course, within the perspective of a citizen of the technological society, something is only defined in terms of its utility and function. Then there is no difference between a cave and a building: both are types of dwelling and nothing else.
ldquo;Machinery blends with the natural and techne becomes episteme.”
If you accept mechanical realism then it does. If you do not accept it then it doesn’t.
“What are the rewards of pursuing a policy of unrealism?”
I am not. I am criticising scientific realism. In fact, I am a realist about my interpretation of physics. It is true regardless of whether you believe it or not.
I quite agree that I am a realist, and can see that you are. That is the point. There are no rewards in pursuing a policy of unrealism.
“Popper is criticized, supposedly discredited but so far not refuted. I also dispute what you say about working scientists not spending their time falsifying theories. That is what they are always doing. Even if they spend a lifetime building a supercollider or merely collecting data, it was most likely done to falsify false hypotheses quite consciously, and, if not, that is what the data will be used for.”
I completely disagree with you about this because empirically (in my experience at CERN, at the ULT physics lab in Lancaster, in the mouse genetics lab in Bath, in the laser physics lab in Bristol, at the ant ecology lab in Bath, at the chemical engineering lab in Bath, at the non-linear dynamics lab in Lancaster, and the astrophysics centre in Preston, as well as others—including the glaucoma-retina research lab in Manchester), the scientists I have met have all been predominantly concerned with making their technologies work and explaining them using theory. Even though all of their work was falsifiable in principle, they did not spend any time trying to falsify anything. They were all interested in discovering how to do more with the work and to make novel discoveries. Physicists and engineers did not build supercolliders in order to falsify the standard model of elementary particle interactions—they built them in order to find the Higgs Boson, the Top-Quark, and Supersymmetric Gluons as predicted by the model. Of course, if they don’t find them then this will be something of a career disaster for the scientists involved. Scientists on the SETI project are not trying to falsify the hypothesis that aliens are using radio waves to communicate. They are trying to discover alien communication using radios. My point was that real working scientists have more of a positive attitude towards theory than Popper’s abstraction allowed for and if scientists are not engaged in falsification, and we still consider them to being in the process of doing science, then there must be some other features which makes their work scientific other than falsification. As a chemist, I very much doubt whether you spent much time falsifying theories. I suspect that you spent much more time (if not all your time) trying to get your experiments to work, trying to understand what was going on when they didn’t, analysing chemicals, and synthesising chemicals. Am I wrong? Of course, the principle of falsification is an abstract way of discribing the trial and error process of test and elimination, but it is, at most, only an aspect of scientific work. It is not the essential demarcation criterion that Popper considered it to be.
I never realised you had done so many interesting things! I think you are right and wrong here. Much of the error maybe comes from your failure to recognize that much of science is descriptive and not a question of making or testing hypotheses in a direct way. People did think that hypotheses had to be verified, when they plainly cannot be in any absolute sense. And, if some supposed verification was sufficient, then what distinguished science from pseudo-science like astrology or the political interpretations of Marxism. Their explanations could always explain anything at all that happened. The journalists that report the movements of the stock-exchange are exactly the same. Whether the direction is up or down, they always know why. Whence the criterion of falsification. I have read pieces of work that seem to interpret this as meaning that some hypothesis is only scientific when it is falsified! Now, I think falsification is right because, for me, the most important part of science, and what leads to innovation is its hypothesising, even though, you are right that there are really few scientists who are actually trying to find important explanations for things. Most scientists are technicians, as you say, and would not know a hypothesis if they saw one, but I think this is a failure of the normal scientific education. I think that people should be taught the fundamental philosophy of science even if they will not become scientists, just as people should be taught arithmetic even though they will not become accountants or mathematicians and should be tauhgt how to read even though they might never pick up a book because they spend their time watching soap operas or playing video games. Your pals who are trying to build the supercollider to find the Higgs boson might not find it when they think they should have, based on their current hypotheses. that is testing the hypotheses, and having done it, they would have to revise them. Incidentally, it is an example of absence of evidence being evidence. SETI is testing the hypothesis that there are intelligent aliens capable of communicating across space. Again absence of evidence is evidence of absence! As a chemist, I spent a fair amount of my time being a technician, sampling, following routine extraction and purification procedures, and analysing the results. But the results might be abnormal, and then you have to start theorising, haven’t you, and testing your hypotheses then taking some corrective measure, perhaps.
“I cannot believe that you, along with hacks, many Christians and scientific detractors generally, think that science must falsify the theories it holds to be true for them to be scientific theories. That was not Popper’s idea.”
That is not what I said. There are many other things that I did not say. I also did not say that Popper was twenty feet tall with blue hair. What I said was: “Putting aside that working scientists do not actually spend very much time falsifying theories (and hence are doing something else apart from Popper’s method)… which Popper did not allow people to use to verify a theory. One cannot logically verify the falsification.”
As I said, I did not believe you had said it, and that was why I phrased it this way, but by implying that scientists must spend time doing it, it sounded as if that was the implication.
“The point is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable,…”
I understood that after reading the first couple of pages of The Logic Of Scientific Discovery.
“…thereby dismissing from science religions, psychiatric schools and political ideologies. Science is constantly making observations to test ideas, and no test can be a test if it can always be passed.”
Indeed. But my point was that the problem with ancilliary hypotheses is that we cannot know why any test failed. Was it something that we assumed in the theory or was it something we assumed in the test?
I have to take your word for it that there are assumptions that could make the inferences from the test grossly wrong. I suppose the hypothesis that the sheep in the UK a few years ago were suffering from foot and mouth disease could have been wrong because we assumed they were not suffering from boredom. Or stones do not fall to the ground by an attractive force but fly off into space from a repulsive one because we failed to take congnisance of our observations being reflected in the sky by assuming we were making them directly. Mainly the assumptions we make are that the laws of Nature are not a function of position—on our scale of measurement, anyway—and such things, but these are things that have been tested themselves. The assumption is that they apply in our untested instance allowing us to test for something else. And again, if such assumptions were unjustified, the hypotheses made of them would soon begin to fail in circumstances where the assumptions were false.
“So, every time some scientific hypothesis is verified by a test that could have been failed, the scientist is trying to falsify the hypothesis.”
That’s pretty clear too. But this assumes that scientists actually spend time testing hypotheses. Most of the time, scientists are trying to make their experiments work and discover new things. The aesthetic and existential aspects of experimental science are two aspects that Popper pretty much neglected. Moreover, Popper’s obsession with physics shows that his conception of test is pretty much one of deducing and predicting machine performances. Popper had assumed mechanical realism and, ironically, his theory of science was presupposed untestable metaphysics. The context of test is technological. However, if we do not follow suit then it seems to me that Freudian psychology is testable—in the sense that it is supposed to be the foundation of a psychiatric therapy and the test is obviously whether it helps people. It does not follow from any successes, that it might have, that things such as the id and superego exist (these might just be ways that the theory is used to interpret the discourse of the patient), but it would fail if it was pretty evident that most people were worse off or unchanged as a result of therapy. It is also evident that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific theory but is not actually testable through deductions and predictions. Darwin’s theory operates on a coherence principle by unifying and explaining a whole host of otherwise disparate phenomena—it would fail if it was shown to be inconsistent and also incapable of explaining anomalies. The reason why Darwin’s theory is scientific is because it allows a whole mess of evidence to be organised and inter-related in order to explain the variation of life on earth in a way that allows people to explore the application of the theory to the world. Marx’s theory is a political-economic theory and its purpose is to simply the complex of economic and political relations so it can offer general explanations in terms of concepts such as exchange-value, but it also offers predictions of expectations and changes in the value of labour versus profits over cycles of variation in exchange-value. The purpose of Marx and Darwin’s theories was to explain and both can be falsified by the explanatory inadequacy, should it be shown that they are inadequate.
What I was saying is that the test need not have been explicitly a test, but might have been an activity such as those you mentioned. An experiment to build a machine to use the gold hooks from the sky to get to heaven without dying might have some trouble in being realised. We might have to conclude that the hypothesis of gold hooks from the sky was wrong, although we were not explicitly testing it. Removing the jargon from supposed profound theories often deflates them back to the level of the commonplace. It does for much of psychiatric theory by whichever of its gurus you choose, and it probably works for much of philosophy too. I do not doubt, in all my criticisms of Christianity, that it helps some people, and no doubt psychiatry, astrology, homeopathy and even aromatherapy do too. Belief and particularly attention helps, and the reason is simple psychology. It is testable and it works. So does a rabbit’s foot. You do not need to think the rabbit’s foot is God but simply that it will help. It does. Any scientific effect has to be above and beyond this psychological and TLC effect. When it comes to explanations, the success or failure of this or that can always be explained away by the dominance of the id over the ego, or vice versa, or anything else that sounds plausible, Marx prophesied that the capitalist system was on its lazzies over ahundred years ago. It still survives, stronger than ever. So, Marxism failed, like Christianity in its prime prediction, even though much of its analysis remains valid in my opinion. Christ prophesied that the kingdom of god would come 2000 years ago and it still has not, yet believers still believe. Both of these theologies have explanations for their failures that convince the believers, but are not falasifiable and so are not scientific. You have explained evolution. It is so commonon sensical that the only reason it was not realized centuries before it was is the baneful influence of Christianity with its jealous God. It makes predictions that are, now especially, testable by protein and DNA analysis, and the DNA explains why it happens. But I agree that it is based on truth being coherent as well as correspondent. GM must be nearly capable of making a new species, the ultimate test of evolutionary genetic theory, with the prospect of armies of non-human soldiers cloned from some GM species cut from human material but without the fretful brain. Is Bush or Rumsfeld a prototype?
“Even if science is no more than mechanical realism, it could not succeed in making machines unless it were logical.”
Not true. As I argue in the book, physics proceeds through trial and error and explains its successes in hindsight. The invention of the steam engine and the electromagnetic motion were trial and error processes that preceded theory. It is often that case that discovery occurs when experimenters defy logic or take leaps in logic. The constraint that science is logical is more evident in the work of positivistic plodders, rather in the creative work.
You are right if trial and error is itself devoid of logic. I have already argued that science is essentially trial and error systematized, but I do not think anyone tackling any practical problem does not reason in trying to make it work. The various solutions tried, are not merely random ones, even for the creative genius, perhaps especially for them. Heraclitus is supposed, I believe, to have built the first steam engine, a heated sphere containing water with two tangential vents causing it to spin on an axis when the water boiled. Am I to suppose that he accidentally put it together one day. Your logical leap is more to the point, but it is still logical. What positive plodding physicists do today I do not know, but then i do not know much about what the wunderkinden at Geneva do either but I find it hard to imagine that supercolliders are being developed by pure trial and error with no logic involved. But I have to bow here to your own direct experience, so accept you are correct. I use a quotation from Thomas Fuller, somewhere. it is, ’The world would perish were all men learned’. They might be loathesome but plodders are necessary.
“As for Popper allowing this or not allowing that, he is a philosopher of science not a legislator of it.”
He set himself up—see the beginning of The Logic of Scientific Discovery—as presenting a principle of demarcation between science and nonscience. It seems very evident that he was trying to legislate what consituted science and a logical scientific method.
He might also have thought he was Napoleon. It is up to others to decide whether his principles make him a lawmaker.
“He is trying to work out how it works at its best and from that perhaps suggesting what is best practice, but he has no authority to forbid any scientist from doing something.”
Of course not. But he would say that they were not doing science when they were doing something other than testing falisiable hypotheses.
Did he say that, and, if so, did he mean it to be consciously and constantly? It is plain that data collection is part of science without it specifically being a test of anything, but data have no use unless it is to figure out why they are as they are.
“In fact, Popper was dissatisfied with the notion that experiments verified hypotheses because failures of some theories like Christianity, Freudianism, and Marxism could always be explained away by the theory.”
But, once we take the problem of auxilliary hypotheses into account then we can also see how the failures of physics could be explained away by appeal to ad hoc hypotheses. In fact, Popper’s criticisms were primarily directed at positivistic theories of science since Hume’s inductive logic.
Inductive logic is just not the whole story. If you were presented with some data, say a time series, then all you can do to begin with is induce some hypothesis about it. Then you can test it. But you have to begin somewhere and induction is a good enough word for it.
“Verification was only valid so long as any experiment had refutation of the hypothesis as a possible outcome. It ensured it was scientific and not pseudoscience or scientism.”
Yes, I know this. But the problem arises when one wants to know why an experiment failed. The problem is that unless one can ground such activity in logic then it is not a special rational activity and whether something is considered methodical is a matter of intuition, aesthetics, or social convention. As I said previously.
Repetition is called for. No single failure is sufficient because it might have been some carelessness of practice—the experiment went wrong. It has to be suspected initially, and the experiement is repeated, then repeated with changes to the procedure to try to correct any suspected errors. I suppose this is the trial and error you speak of, and it is doubtless intuitive, nothing wrong with that, but is also rational and based on experience. You know what the difficulties are from experience or suspect possible causes. You mentioned the spinning of the cylinders in Morpurgo’s experiment to find free quarks. It stopped the charge drift but the experiment still did not yield any evidence of free quarks. As for logic, I suppose the idea was that the field was too delicate to be stable in a static system and spinning is a form of averaging out small fluctuations that made the field drift. Of course, I don’t know, but all I am arguing is that it is not purely ad hoc but involves experience and reason. Aesthetics in science is an interesting problem for someone sympathetic to science to pursue sometime. Machines do not have to be pretty to work. Social convention? Well, I suppose people do want to get their degrees, and it is brave and perhaps stupid to take a stance before you have any independence. I had to adopt forms of analysis that were crap, but, whereas the opinions expressed from this analysis are worthless, the data stand for someone else to analyse properly. It was not stuff that was going to break any mould! Plodding, I guess.
“As for auxiliary assumptions, we are in the realm of the weight of the string in simple pendulum experiments. If the experiment is well designed, then there should be no auxiliary assumptions that can be significant.”
In which case you have either misunderstood the problem of ancilliary hypotheses or you have only considered simple experiments. Try thinking about neutrino physics! Is the failure to detect the expected number of solar neutrinos by deep underground liquid based detectors a problem with the theory or the detector design? The postulated hypothesis of the neutrino oscillation mechanism is one that has only recently began to be accepted since it is used to successfully predict and interpret the performances of a new generation of machines (such as the Karell 2 detector). Is it the case that this hypothesis has corrected a flaw in the theory or are the new machines lacking the flawed hypothesis used to design the original liquid based detectors?
Its recent acceptance matches my lack of knowledge of it until recently. From where I stand, it looks like a fudge, but one that will break down if that is all it is. Presumably the three forms of the neutrino in this resonance have different properties, and these can be used to test the hypothesis of the oscillation. Evidently only one of them reacts with chlorine atoms. I don’t know what the Karell 2 detector does that the old ones based on chlorine did not, but presumably it detects more than just one of the hypothetical oscillating forms. And the three forms of neutrino were expected on some other grounds, were they not, so the fudge, or auxiliiary hyothesis if that is what it is, is not purely arbitrary. Presumably there is some theoretical reason for expecting three types of neutrino.
“We are stuck again with the confusion of proof and evidence, something that I am told by R Rosen does not happen in German because both are the same word. I do not think scientists take their models as proof of anything, especially as the models keep getting refined or bounded by further observations. They take them as evidence that they are modelling reality with some degree of accuracy, and successive models improve it. I suppose that producing rays from vacuum tubes with copper electrodes and finding that they were electromagnetic waves of peculiar penetrative power was the invention of a machine done serendipitously, as science often is. Was it serendipitous then that these x-rays were then found in Nature? I suppose it was yet another fortunate coincidence. Science has that serendipitous character of generating lucky coincidences that turn out to be exciting discoveries.”
You really must believe that I have X-ray vision!!!!!! This might be a bit of a shock to you, but human beings cannot see X-rays. They are invisible. In fact, based on our experience of X-rays, they are actually the index (a collective name) for a whole host of representations and concepts used to explain our experiences of photographic plates and other detectors. We use X-rays to explain machine performances. When X-rays were in turn explained as being electromagnetic radiation, this was achieved by bringing together previously disparated machines and reinterpreting this connection as being the extension of a machine-family. This is interpreted as disclosing ontological depth. I discuss this in my book (in chapters 4 and 5).
You discuss this construct of machine families, and mention that some of them let us understand phenomena in terms of invisible entities. But however skeptical you are about the entities, the machines do let us see things invisible to us. X-rays do it specifically. You can X-ray a cadaver and then cut it open and find what the X-ray showed was there. You can use them to see inside suitcases at aerodromes, and then open them to check them for revolves or hand-grenades. They are machines, if you like, but ones which can be directly verified for the truth or otherwise of what they present to us. Let a man give to me a machine he has made but which I know nothing about. It makes a line on a graph paper when light is shone on it. Let me arrange for the light from a prism to illuminate this machine and it draws a line every time a spectral line of light crosses it. I can see the coloured bands in the spectrum and can verify that the machine responds when the light is on the detector. The apparatus is evidently detecting light by giving some signal that corresponds to the light I can see. I might be able then to use it for many other purposes such as night vision which it would be useless for, if it were not doing what I hypothesised it is doing, and so on, or might find that it responds when I turn the prism until the spectrum has passed over it completely, then see a response. Here is a dilemma such as those you have been posing. Is the apparatus faulty? There is no light I can see, or is there light but it is light I cannot see? It is more than just an explanation of a machine performance because it corresponds with what we see. There is no need to bore you further, for all I am saying is that the scientific explanation of these things is better than the complex of jargon needed to make it into a mere artefact of machine manipulation. It is not just machine performance or modelling because I can often sense for myself what the machine senses. If it is modelling then it is realistic and useful modelling, like models of complex building or the human body, showing where bits are. Even a model relates to reality.
“My point is that the people who conceived of sails on ships or windmills did it through their experience of the ‘force’ of the wind.”
And my point is that the application of the modern concept of ‘force’ to wind was not possible prior to the C16th and, hence, nobody had an experience of the force of the wind. They understood the wind differently.
“I use the quizzical marks this time to show they would have had no such word, but still had the experience of that phenomenon of the wind we now call force.”
Not true. “Force” is an abstract. It is a way of understanding the behaviour of the wind. Prior to the C16th people had different experiences of the wind.
I do not know how they experienced, though you evidently do, but they had enough gumption to realize that the wind could pump water and grind corn, things that we call doing work, whatever they called it, and work is the application of force, whatever they called it.
“The invention of sails was doubtless purely empirical. They felt the wind, and saw it blow down trees.”
Make sense to me. They probably were watching leaves or maybe even a flag at the time and thought that it could blow a boat along. But maybe they also thought they were watching someone catch birds using a cloth and thought, maybe, they could catch the wind. But they probably did not think of it in terms of a force. Especially a newtonian mechanical force.
“In the parable I gave earlier, some primitive people realised they could use a sail to propel a boat. If I am to imagine science as a handicraft, then this is how it was initiated, surely. It agrees with your own scenario.”
Indeed
“…but my point is that such crafts used an experience of reality to make the machine ensuring the machine reflects natural principle at work.”
But my point is that historically, the understanding of the machines in terms of natural principles at work follows the invention of the machine. Not the other way around.
If the natural principles were not understood, it could not have been other. The point is that Nature is real, and gives rise to real phenomena which are experienced. A flash of gestalt would reveal a use for it.
“…I am saying they had the experience of what we call force and energy in the wind. Our notions of energy and force were experienced by those people, however they might have considered them—gods, the breath of God or whatever.”
I understand. I don’t agree. Force is an abstract used to explain experience. It is not the case that the primitives interpreted forces in quaint ways—it is the case that the C16th and C17th physics invented a new way of understanding experience.
And a better way in that it made it easier to innovate new machines, if nothing else. Even so, the older ways must have led to some insights to allow people to progress sufficiently to want a better system of understanding.
“Another of your heroes, Heidegger, has dasein, das sein and das seiende, all of which seem to mean being—but apparently not existence—but in such subtly different ways that ambiguity becomes profundity.”
I really do not quite understand why you keep on calling writers that I critique in my book as being heroes. But if it amuses you…why should I care? What’s more important is that you seem to have misunderstood Heidegger, which is a very easy thing for anybody to do, I admit, but you have jumped the gun and taken to be your own lack of appreciation of the subtleties of his work to be his failing. I’m not saying that you should understand Heidegger or even that you should try to understand his work, but you really should try to be less dismissive when you fail to grasp the meaning of words because their usage is unfamiliar to you. After all, how good is your understanding of german? I don’t know whether you can read german or not, but it seems to me that you would have to be pretty damn confident to say that the ambiguities in Heidegger’s distinction between Das Sein and ek-sistenz was somehow a problem with Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit (rather than your understanding of his work). Das Sein does not mean “being” (that would be sein) but it literally means being-there or there-being and is used by Heidegger to explore the ontological foundation of being a Being for whom its own existence is an issue. He uses Das Sein, which in ordinary german is taken to be existence, in a way different from the ordinary usage in order to differentiate being from existence for the Being for whom existence is a concern. He was concerned about the Being that can raise the question of its own existence and cares about it. This Being is situated in relation to its own sense of temporality and mortality. Hence, Heidegger is called an existentialist. But I don’t pretend to have a complete grasp of Heidegger’s work but it is certainly does not deserve to be dismissed as “ambiguity becomes profundity”.
Believe me, I respect your intelligence, but I am inclined to say, “No further questions, Your Honour”.
“Define observations as theory laden with Feyerabend and Kuhn and suddenly science cannot work because different theoretical explanations are not commensurable.”
Whilst I think that both Feyerabend and Kuhn go too far with their notion of theory laden, they both induced the theory ladenness of observation from their historical analyses and did not simply define observation as being theory laden. They concluded that it was after arguing their case. But I’m pleased that you have found time to read Feyerabend. Did you read Against Method? What did you think of his analysis of Galileo’s experiments?
You are a comic, Karl!
“On the other hand, deconstruction in which the text defies the author is indefinable according to its inventor.”
Que?
“I am not a philosopher, perhaps because I have the bad habit of trying to use words with their common interpretation.”
So you say. But do you? How do you know what the common interpretation of words is?
“I accept the word “experiment” and that is why I think we have to progress cautiously.”
Good. But the question is: how? what should the constraints be? how should they be decided?
“I am more scared of doing some things than some scientists—often speaking where the money is, for their bosses—such as GM and nuclear power until problems are resolved. My fears over these things are precisely because I believe in correspondence, and I suspect you do too, when it comes to the possibility of poisoning the world either now or in the future with radioactive waste, or releasing triffids into the natural environment.”
Yes, but the problem is that if the question of whether a science, such as physics, is an experiment that achieves its understanding of correspondence purely in hindsight after it brings new powers into the world then it raises the question about whether we should place societal limitations on the directions of scientific work. How could we do this? The radioactive waste and the biological interventions are already here and now and yet the drive to innovate and release new powers and new unforseen side-effects is still running amok. Of course I am being critical by raising the question of whether the technological society is actually rational. Given that I argue that the technological society is premised on a societal gamble of the goodness of the society (in the sense that it is good for us to live in it) and yet that society is uncontrollable in its leadlong rush to innovate in ways that may well be extremely bad for us (as well as other forms of life) then perhaps the experiment is a failure because it lacks control and balance. If the objectivity of sciences such as physics is questionable then they cannot be treated as special rational pursuits. Instead, they become subordinate to questions of the human condition, the nature and possibility of rationality, and political economy.
Political economy. We should have social limits on what rulers do, whether governments or corporations. Science has no function in social decision making.
“We disagree again because I think that as long as correspondence works the suppositions of science are being upheld.”
As I have argued in the book and in previous emails, the problem is that the estimations of how correspondence works are established in technological contexts and thus a science such as physics is inherently technological and is based on a technological representation of Nature. Thus “the suppositions of physics”—the precepts of mechanical realism—remain untested whilst physics makes technological progress in providing new powers, theories, techniques, and machine prototypes.
The leading science now is molecular biology. You say you have yet to generalise your analysis of physics to all science, but evidently now we can manipulate the substance of life and see what happens. We are dealing in chain molecules, eggs, cells and cloning and splicing. We are manipulating life not machines even if we are using machines like microscopes to do it. Yet the correspondence principle still pertains. Separating a divided cell and allowing the two to grow independently gives us a pair of clones. It is what we expected—correpondence.
“In science we cannot *prove* anything by experiment, as you have said before, because all possible circumstances cannot be tested, but so long as the experiment has a possible outcome that contradicts the hypothesis it is testing, but does not do so, the experiment is scientifically valid and the hypothesis is upheld.”
You need to actually look at the practices of experimentation and look at how the testing is done and how the hypotheses are constructed in such a way as to allow them to be tested. This is why I argue that physics (as theoretical and practical) is inherently technological because the tests and hypotheses are constructed in technological terms.
The eskimos are said to have had a large number of different words for snow. We have words for what we are familiar with. Could physics have been anything other than technological?
“If science is an experiment then it might eventually fail, and maybe it is doing with the violation of Bell’s inequality. We shall then find the limits of science, just as we found the limits of Newton’s laws.”
The violation of Bell’s inequality would not be a failure of physics. In many respects it would be a triumph. It would require refinements in the world-picture and new fundamental representations. These refinements and representations would only be accepted if they were instrumentally valuable in the innovation of new machines and the associated new powers.
But not if it allowed us to become telepathic, say, and to communicate instantly over vast spaces.
“…but if [the scientific method] causes an inadequate conclusion to be drawn, subsequent attempts to us that hypothesis will eventually fail and require a re-think. Science is built on previous science, and when some course of bricks in the construction proves to be faulty, the subsequent courses become askew or will not bear any further load. That presumably requires a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s way of thinking. As you said, its truth status is ultimately deferred to some future state of completion, a brilliant expression of the fact that science can never be complete.”
[Sigh]. So what implications do you draw from its perpetual incompleteness and the claim that it has correspondence to objective reality? Moreover, what do you think that the implications are for a science such as physics which bases its own progress upon technological innovation? If it remains incomplete then we will never truly understand what it is that we have done or are doing or will do? Isn’t that a troubling implication for you?
I have no illusion that I am God, and am confident that no other human is either. So, I do not understand why I should be troubled that I am not. Whatever we do, we have to begin somewhere and put up with whatever happens in between until it is finished. With a small construction, I put up with the mess until it is done, but with a large construction, I would be sensible to build it in modules, so that I can get a use out of the parts even before the whole is complete. That is what science and technology does, and I agree that there are dangers. Some things are not necessary and ethical committees try to stop them, but, as I repeatedly say, scientists have no power to stop any ruthless tyrant whether elected or not from doing just as they like. My experience is that scientists are more likely to be concerned about some scientific projects damamnded by corporations than the general public are, simply because most people either do not know, or think it will never happen here. The rulers need to be ruled. But that is just what our society is designed to prevent.
“I am a scientific realist that is not enamoured of the technological society but think we have to step back from the gross exploitation of the planet corporations are indulging in to a more organic and natural position if we are to survive, but I see the scientific method as the way that we can learn how to live organically without destroying the world. If that means a new concept of science not based on machines, then I am not bothered about it, but the basic method of observation, hypothesis, deduction, testing, observation which constitutes the scientific method is the way we can find out how to live best with the rest of the world’s life forms without driving them to extinction.”
Agreed.
“It seems that some medic at Sheffield university (I think) is warning us that a third of British couples will be having fertility problems in only a few years’ time. He wants to start some programme to stop this ‘disease’. I fear it is not a disease at all but the immune system of the Goddess Nature finding ways of combatting the odious parasite that has gone out of control in her biosphere.”
It seems to me that it would be much more scientific and beneficial to identify and remove the environmental pollution that leads to fertility problems, rather than treat it as an isolated medical problem requiring a corrective interventional technique into the biochemical condition of the sexual organs. In my view, medicine needs to be holistic rather than mechanistic. It would be also much wiser and better for people in overcrowded countries such as the UK to consider adopting children and give the children that already exist a good life, rather than focus on improving their own fertility in order to bring more into the world. I think that the government could help to encourage this by rationalising the security procedures needed to vet would be adopters (to protect children from pederasts and slavers), by linking them to social services and the police as a “top priority” service, and also by giving serious tax breaks and financial support to people who adopt children. After all, it is pretty expensive to keep children in social service care and it may even be more cost effective to place children in good homes and then help their new parents with their additional expenses. Of course, the welfare of such children needs to be monitored by officials in order to protect them from abusers, but this is true of every child, and should be part of the responsibilities of local doctors and teachers.
I agree with you here, but it is idealistic at the edges. The abusers seem to wheedle their way into every home for deprived children there is, and then they form cells that protect each other. Adeelphiasophism does not have the absurd hatred that patriarchal religions have against homosexuality, and that is another way that the problem of overpopulation can be alleviated. Of course, the general public associate homosexuality with pedophilia, though pedophiles are most usually heterosexual ’friends’ of the family, teachers or priests. Pedophiles should be treated severely, but then so should pushers of hard drugs. Both destroy the lives of innocent people. Given the chance we all become tyrants!
“The trouble is that the free school idea only works when the pupils are motivated to study in the first place. Many British schools have been chaotic for years because most pupils will not learn, and the people who suffer most are the ones who do want to learn something.”
It certainly is the case that the fundamental problem for any good education system is how to motivate children. It is my belief that most children will not learn because they do not want to partcipate. They are stubbonly defying the school system that has hurt or betrayed them in the past by either belittling them or bullying them. It is a tragedy. What such children need is to have their trust in schools re-established through play, sports, fun, and games, with the help of kind and intelligent teachers. But it is evident that the children who still want to learn need to be taught separately from the alienated children. They should be taught through inspiration and example, having free and guided access to computers, libraries, museums, workshops, and laboratories. Education should be fun. The test of a school should be when children do not want to go home.
The Montessori schools have a good reputation for young children, but they do not usually need motivating, unless they have been abused and are scared. It is the teenage kids who are in a mess, and it seems to me because they have illusions, fed by a load ot TV crap. Wealth and success is pictured as simple. No effort needed. No knowledge needed. Not even talent.
“And, if they are to go at their own pace, which is plainly desirable, teachers must have the time to deal with pupils who are all going at different rates. It will need individual tuition to work properly.”
I agree. It seems to me that if a country such as the UK were to declare its neutrality (leaving NATO) and reduce its armed forces (transforming them into smaller, special forces dedicated to border protection, military intelligence, and special ops), then there would be a huge amount of available resources for education (and health). Secondary school teachers should be required to pass much more stringent specialist qualifications (after having achieved professional qualifications or a PhD) and then be paid an excellent salary with all the fringe benefits. Primary school teachers should be professional specialists in child care and primary school teaching. It should be a highly paid and supported occupation. Being a public school teacher should be an ambition that is difficult to achieve and only those that “cut the mustard” should be allowed to work as teachers. As difficult as becoming a doctor or lawyer.
Top teachers do get a load of money, but the privatization of education being carried out by Blair is scary. Private educattion must end up elitist education, so far as I can see, for how can money be made out of educating people unless the parents end up paying.
“Otherwise the kids will have to be streamed with the problems associated with that, particularly of categorizing kids in the slow streams as failures.”
I agree that it is monstrous to categorise children as failures. The reason why this has been done in the past was in order to create the “natural” division of labour of the workforce. The policy was to destroy the hopes, aspirations, and expectations of enough children in order to provide the manual labourers and factory workers of the future. The problem with the streaming system is that it is one-dimensional: it only values academic achievement (i.e. rewards those good at paper work—the future managers, bureaucrats, and professionals). Again it was set up to create a “white collar” work force. However, in an ideal imaginary world, education should be set up to be of benefit to children. Such an education system needs to recognise and reward difference in the abilities and talents of children. Thus it should value creative arts, sports, music, games, theatre, practical crafts, as all having equal weighting to academic studies. Instead of streaming according to abilities, children should be differentiated according to interests. Let them focus on what they want to—they’ll pick up other stuff as they go along and develop other interests. In my experience, interest and ability walk hand in hand.
Agreed, but they have eventually to be led to do some things they do not like. When I was a kid, I remeber kids whose parents paid for them to have piano lessons. They hated having to stay in an extra hour two or three trimes a week but, i bet most of them are thankful they did. For my own part, though i enjoyed many of the subjects at school, there were some I hated like Latin, languages generally in fact, and modern history, and I was never fond of school as a whole. Even so, it must have been better than many modern schools where chaos is the king.
“We have twenty years of immaturity so that we can fill our craniums with knowledge that will be useful in life. To do it, we all, kids included, need to recognize that they are obliged to be taught for their own good as well as society’s.”
Agreed. And the best way to show children that learning is good for them it to make it pleasurable and interesting. The best motivator is always one that appeals to self-motivation. Personally, I believe that the good of society is best achieved through increasing the happiness of its members by providing the means through which they can achieve their own happiness for themselves. The good of society should be a “by product” of the good of its members and this, in turn, becomes a resource and inspiration for future members (immigrants and children) when living in such a society is appreciated as being good for its members.
Agreed again, but unless someone has an ability at mathematics, perhaps a precocious one, how can we impress on to them the value of, say, integration, differentiation and deteminants? It has to be less compelling than football for most young boys.
“I cannot see why science and philosophy cannot be introduced at school with courses in problem solving. Kids do problems as an entertainment, so they should not even regard it as a learning chore, if it is introduced well.”
I agree. And with the multi-media resources available today, science caught be presented as pretty exciting stuff. But what children need to hands on science in the form of playful exploration of the world around them. Philosophy should be introduced as part of problem solving, but it should also be introduced as part of social skills too. In my opinion, children should have, from day one, some democratic influence in how schools are run (obviously, being someone who has read Lord of the Flies, I think that this should be mediated by the teachers, providing different levels of input and decision making as they get older), what they have for lunch, what sort of lessons they should take, how to deal with bullies, etc. Philosophy could well be introduced the context of introducing democracy to children.
The trouble is that free schools do not seem to have worked that well. But children respond to rules as long as they are perceived to be sensible. In the UK at the moment are some reality programmes about badly behaved kids at home, and mostly it is because they dod not have clear rules and their parents are themselves pretty mixed up. The psychologists who advise on these programmes set rules and try to get the perents to apply them, and generally the kids respond. Kids are not savages, pace, Lord of the Flies. They like civilization and respond to it!
“The trouble is that democracy is a sham. The demos has no power. We are ruled.”
Unfortunately, this is true. Modern democracy is nothing more than a crowd control technique.
“Marx was right.”
In part, I agree. However, Marx and Engels would have done better if they had spent more effort on basing their conception of communism on fully participatory democracy—at least as a stage towards communism—in order to prevent the sort of charismatic leadership that Lenin had encouraged which paved the way for Stalin’s dictatorship. Once the locus of decision making moved away from the community and into the hands of an intelligentsia and charismatic individual then the failure of Soviet communism was built into it from the onset.
I do not disgree here, either, but US political economics had a major role in the whole kaboodle from the start. Left to itself, it should have failed anyway, according to Marx, because it was a backward country, but it might have succeeded, who knows, without the intervening dictatorship.
“Despite all the media propaganda, we have a ruling class and they are the ones who employ us all, scientists included. We would need a revolution and the institution of some proper form of democracy for us to by pass politicians and corporate bosses and tell the scientists directly what we want them to do.”
Or, alternatively, we could—including scientists—take the route of non co-operation and withdraw our labour. We could strike until the “ruling class” surrender the means of production or learn how to do the work or research themselves. They are only the “ruling class” because we obey them. This is also why I think that children should be taught how to be democratic at school, so they have practised democratic decision making from as young an age as possible. They should be quite good at it by adulthood and thus not need to be lead by rulers or require their “democratic” participation to be a once every four or five year “colour coded” tick the box mechanism for giving the public servants of the ruling class a self-justificatory mandate to act in their own self-interest. In my view, as part of the process of reforming the democratic system, moving towards a democratic system, we need to abolish party politics and, instead, have every single public office a matter for seperate election between individual candidates that must stand on their own merits. The resultant officials must then negotiate policies with each other, which should be then offered for ratification by public referendum prior to implementation. The same could also be done for the running of schools, hospitals, public utilities, transportation, etc. Obviously for some things the decision making process would stay at a local level, whilst for others it would require national ratification.
Sounds as though the world will have to collapse first. Again the trouble with strikes is that they are rarely political and any hint of politics in one, sets the media against them, and secondly that they are never sufficinetly united, again because of the control of the mass media by corporate moguls and their political puppets. The miners strike in 1984-5 is a case in point. It was set up by Thatcher at a time when she was ready for it, and the miners fell into the trap. Coal stocks were high, and then for the next year, the media raged against them and the police battered them. It is a wonder it lasted so long, but ever since 1926, the general strike, or even strikes of key workers have been feared by our rulers, so that some were always being bought off on the divide and rule principle. It rarely fails. Heath, who I hear has just died, could have bought off the miners in 1974. Joe Gormley was in favour of it, but Scargill stopped it, Heath went to the country and lost. My guess is that Thatcher was determined not to let it happen again.
“What can unite us all is the appreciation that we face a common enemy. It is environmental destruction. The bloodymindeedness of Bush and the oil barons he stands for shows it is no easy task, even then.”
According to the Declaration of Independence, every American has a patriotic duty to overthrow a tyranical government. It is for this reason that all Americans have the right to bear arms. It is for self-protection against tyrants.
“I just read the beginning of a book (Sex and Destiny) by Germaine Greer in which she denies that books should be openly incitements to action, but that they should incite action by making the reader think about the issues. They should melt concepts so that they will recrystallize in new ways. You are certainly doing that, but, whereas the recrystallization might suggest obvious actions in the social and personal spheres that she deals with, I keep having trouble with it here in this philosophy of science field. You have several times given me the impression that you hate science and would willingly wipe the floor with it, if it were possible. It is not likely, so you might as well settle for some more likely outcome. Greer complained against those who asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’, and that is what has been puzzling me all along. Is philosophy merely to interpret the world or to change it? If it is to change it then the question applies. What do you want us to do?”
I like Germaine Greer. I also would like to think that my book also melted concepts so that they will recrystallize in new ways. I would be very happy if it did that. I guess that what I want is for people to realise that there is nothing compulsory in the way that we investigate Nature using sciences such as physics. We have the choice of looking at Nature in other ways and understanding just as much, if not more. By questioning the objectivity and correspondence of physics, I wanted to challenge the positivistic and scientific realist view that physics was the template science and also that it explored the fundamental stratum of reality. I think that we need to rethink the value of the positivistic sciences and look at how we are representing Nature. Perhaps we are adding insult to injury…
I see nothing wrong in questioning it, but your thesis is a hard place to start questioning science, certainly in its present form. You need to popularize it, if it is possible, by writing articles about it in magazines. Incidentally, is it on the arXiv webpages? If not why not write a simplified account for them?
