Philosophy: books and discussion

[beppe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Um, I guess I should have mentioned "measurable" certainly things must be measurable to make a determination of any kind.

An yes it is to be taken literally. Science is the basis of all truth we know. Anything else is speculation, imagination, fiction.

Please feel free to say worse things.

I can't always say things the best way, but I keep trying. The fact is that everything humanity has achieved is due to our rational scientific approach to interacting with our environment.

In my post I use measure in a mathematical sense. It has nothing to do with instruments.

Then if you take it literally you are open, as I just gave you examples, to any tricky ambiguity. And prey of all the false prophets that abound.

One worse thing.
Your statement is DOGMATIC.

I am sure that that is not what you wanted.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by beppe

In my post I use measure in a mathematical sense. It has nothing to do with instruments.

Then if you take it literally you are open, as I just gave you examples, to any tricky ambiguity. And prey of all the false prophets that abound.

One worse thing.
Your statement is DOGMATIC.

I am sure that that is not what you wanted.

There are no prophets, we can only know what we can know. We have to do the best we can and that is science and the scientific method upon which it is based. Anything other than that is potentially false.

Math is science.

[GeoffC]

But Math is also art....

[beppe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

There are no prophets, we can only know what we can know. We have to do the best we can and that is science and the scientific method upon which it is based. Anything other than that is potentially false.

Math is science.

There are no prophets, we can only know what we can know.

A part from the tautology, I agree totally in what I know you mean by this.

We have to do the best we can and that is science. Absolutely.

the scientific method upon which it is based. That, I am afraid, and I tried to show you why in simple and elementary terms, is pure arbitrarian black magic. Even with science, that is our only hope, we are fumbling in the darkness. It is too big and complex and it lasts for too long. There is very little we can say about it and every thing we say is highly doubtful. We stiil try to do our best.

Math is science.
Math is not a science. It is the most arbitrary thing ever invented by human mind. It deals with pure abstractions. It is a game. All mathematicians know that, maybe they will not admit it, as it might damage their career or status or whatever, but they all know it. It is enormously useful, it is unbelievably pretty, whatever but it is not a science. You need it for science. As much as one can grasp, and it is always too little.

[TimMason]

"J.L. Austin and his fellow 1950s philosophers of language are said to have played a game called Vish! You look up a word, and then look up words in its dictionary definition; when you have got back to the original word, you cry Vish! for vicious circle."
(Ian Hacking, "The Social Construction of What?")

In fact, your cite from the dictionary is a bit of a fudge: you start with definition 2a). So what is 1, and how many lettered subsections are there?

If I reach down my Shorter OED, I can see that there are 14 different definitions for the word 'knowledge'. If I were to have the full OED to hand, I don't know how many more would be added to the list, but I have no doubt that it would be considerable lengthened. And no dictionary is ever complete.

What I mean here by a 'way of knowing' is something like this: it is a process, enshrined in an institution or set of institutions, through which members achieve a minimal, agreed-upon set of statements about the world which they consider to be true.

If we are talking about a set of institutions, then some statements may be local to specific institutions within the set. For example, in the Australian desert, initiated men have a different set of statements to initiated women, and both have sets which are different to those of the uninitiated. Similarly within the set of scientific institutions some sciences have local truths that others do not share.

Each institution or set of institutions can be considered to have a set of procedures for the production of truth statements. Some of those procedures can be formally stated, while others have to be acquired by practice. The latter are apt to be strongly embedded within specific contexts - places, gatherings, settings and so on.

Institutions within a set are not cloned; they develop historically according to contingencies which are both internal - determined by developments within the domain itself - and external. So despite cross-communication, there is a natural tendency for dispersal (or entropy, if you will).

The knowledge associated with these institutions is made up, then, of both statements and of practices, some of which are codifiable, others less so. Michael Polanyi draws our attention to the fact that some scientific laboratories are more productive over long periods of time than others, and that the less productive labs were unable to produce similarly rich results even if they did their best to emulate procedures. This, he suggested, is because much of the productivity could be accounted for by un-codified and un-codifiable practices that were handed down through unwitting demonstration and imitation. (Procedural knowledge).

Your three part description of the scientific method does not seem to conform to what scientists actually do. This was one of Feyerabend's main points, and he made it by referring to how science really happened, not through the statement of a set of rules. What I think you have done is to set out very clearly the ideology of the scientist, which remains much dependent on Popper. As I mentioned earlier on in this thread, most philosophers of science would not, today, subscribe to Popper's account.

[TimMason]

Anything other than that is potentially false.

... as are the sciences ...

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by TimMason

... as are the sciences ...

Nope. As I explained.

[TimMason]

Nope. As I explained.

Many scientists would disagree with you. Scientific knowledge is, by its nature, provisional. That is, indeed, one of the finest things about science : it seeks its own destruction. A interesting place to catch scientists talking to each other about stuff like this is the RealClimate site.

(This used to be true of "art" too, but in our own tradition we fetishize it, and keep it in a freeze box).

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Many scientists would disagree with you. Scientific knowledge is, by its nature, provisional. That is, indeed, one of the finest things about science : it seeks its own destruction. A interesting place to catch scientists talking to each other about stuff like this is the RealClimate site.

(This used to be true of "art" too, but in our own tradition we fetishize it, and keep it in a freeze box).

Science seeks its own improvement, not destruction. And it challenges the knowledge that is worth challenging, not just anything. Although some people, in science as in other fields, will do anything to get into the limelight, it's not always something to be proud of.

And the statement about art is false also. Art is evolving and being challenged all the time. And here also, sometimes the challenge, just any challenge as long as it makes headlines, will try to pass for the art itself.

[TGS]

So I'm wondering what this thread is about now. On one hand it seems to be about the production of knowledge; Tim seems to be arguing that all knowledge is culturally produced and, as such, has to, and can only be, judged in the context of the "culture" that produced it. Kenny seems to be arguing that knowledge that is "merely" cultural practice is not science and is, therefore, false, whereas "science" is supra-cultural and thus escapes from its cultural constraints and, as well as producing its own knowledge is in a position to assess the knowledge claims of other cultural knowledge production.

Tim's position seems to imply a thoroughgoing cultural relativism - all ontologies and epistemologies are equal, whilst Kenny's seems to imply a cultural hegemony - all ontologies and epistemologies are not equal, and the western scientific ontology and epistemology trumps all others.

If that's a reasonable statement of "the problem" you might expect a solution. Well, I don't have one other than to recollect the Jamesian definition of truth as that which it is useful to believe, (by which he meant that which requires the least adjustment to the existing ontology and epistemology of the one judging the truth or falsehood of a claim).

[TimMason]

Although some people, in science as in other fields, will do anything to get into the limelight, it's not always something to be proud of.

It's the motor behind a scientific career: that's why, despite the rhetoric, scientists very rarely go in for replication. They want to make a name for *themselves*. Science is very competitive.

As for art, I have a close observational interest. Of my four children, three have graduated from Beaux Art schools. I can't say I've been impressed by what they were taught in their various schools.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by TGS

So I'm wondering what this thread is about now. On one hand it seems to be about the production of knowledge; Tim seems to be arguing that all knowledge is culturally produced and, as such, has to, and can only be, judged in the context of the "culture" that produced it. Kenny seems to be arguing that knowledge that is "merely" cultural practice is not science and is, therefore, false, whereas "science" is supra-cultural and thus escapes from its cultural constraints and, as well as producing its own knowledge is in a position to assess the knowledge claims of other cultural knowledge production.

Tim's position seems to imply a thoroughgoing cultural relativism - all ontologies and epistemologies are equal, whilst Kenny's seems to imply a cultural hegemony - all ontologies and epistemologies are not equal, and the western scientific ontology and epistemology trumps all others.

If that's a reasonable statement of "the problem" you might expect a solution. Well, I don't have one other than to recollect the Jamesian definition of truth as that which it is useful to believe, (by which he meant that which requires the least adjustment to the existing ontology and epistemology of the one judging the truth or falsehood of a claim).

Thank you, it seems a good summary to me.

I personally think that knowledge is the product of cultural and social processes, but that it can be assessed objectively... scientifically, as it were.

[TimMason]

@TGS

I don't know how Kennyc will feel about your summary, but I'd like to add a nuance to what you say about my position. I think that science is an excellent way of knowing, and by and large when other ways of knowing stray into the scientific domain, they come off worse. But there are domains where science has little to say, and there are societies which have had no science. That doesn't mean they had no knowledge, nor that they were in any way 'primitive' (when Frank Gillen arrrived at Alice Springs, the Arrernte had as complex a cosmology and social system as anything we've dreamed up)

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by TimMason

It's the motor behind a scientific career: that's why, despite the rhetoric, scientists very rarely go in for replication. They want to make a name for *themselves*. Science is very competitive.

As for art, I have a close observational interest. Of my four children, three have graduated from Beaux Art schools. (One is now a teacher, one a check-out girl at the Beaubourg bookshop, and the third answers a telephone hotline for an insurance company). I can't say I've been impressed by what they were taught in their various schools.

You know more about it than I do then! But schools are far from the only places where art is produced, or even learned. I'll admit that it's probably true that there is a part of the art world that is at the moment, in France, rather stuck in its tracks. Too bad this part happens to have most of the money and media attention But things are changing. Things always change.

[TimMason]

The book I've cited by Hacking is (partly) readable on line here. Feyerabend's 'Against Method' can also be viewed.

I think I'll leave this particular rabbit to run where it will. I don't think that Kennyc and I are likely to reach agreement, and I've had my say. Philosophy is a wide field, and although it obviously touches on religion and on science, I suspect that the original aims that Florence had when she opened this thread were elsewhere. Time to get back to Epicurus