View Single Post
Old 06-15-2010, 03:25 AM   #411
TimMason
Big Ears
TimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it isTimMason knows what time it is
 
TimMason's Avatar
 
Posts: 191
Karma: 2229
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Pontoise, France
Device: Onyx Boox 60, iPad
Quote:
Intuition works, in my opinion, only for the mind prepared by facts. We may gain insights from dreams or eureka moments, but only if the gray cells been fed the information upon which to to work and seek connections, even if that work and those connections have been processed without out conscious awareness.
I'm not sure what your argument is here. It seems as if you are saying that knowledge is either scientific, accidental, or intuitive. Is that right? If it is your position, then I have to differ. The knowledge that the Australian desert dweller had of the land, of the seasons, of the animals (including humans) that lived upon it was rich, integrated, conceptualized quite as rigourously as scientific knowledge. It stood the test of time, and it was flexible enough to stand the tests that changing conditions demanded, even surviving the upheavals occasioned by the English invasion and occupation. Similar stories can be told about the San of southern Africa, or the peoples of the frozen North.

My arguments are close to those of Feyerabend, who argued that science was simply one way of knowing among many, and, moreover, that it should be a little more modest about its pretensions. I would not go that far: most of the scientists I have met have been quite modest men and women (far more so than, say, literary critics, or philsophers), and are mainly interested in their specific field of research. (Those who step outside their playground in their later careers are referred to, sardonically, as 'going emeritus', the feeling being that once they reach that stage, no-one should take any more notice of them than they do of any other duffer with a bee in the bonnet).

But some scientists - Richard Dawkins would be an example - seem to go emeritus prematurely, and are then apt to make claims for "the scientific method" that it simply was not designed to carry. For one thing, there is no single 'scientific method'; the sciences may, as Wittgenstein might have put it, bear a family resemblance to one another, but do not lend themselves to one overarching and constraining definition. Meterology is other than particle physics, and both are other than psychology, which, in turn, should not really be confused with evolutionary biology.

Similarly, the sciences may enter into competition with myth - over questions such as the age of the earth, for example. But it does not replace it, or fulfill the same functions. As Winch concluded, talking about the Azande, there are other ways of knowing, which cannot be measured in the lab.
TimMason is offline   Reply With Quote