From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 23:05:27 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker writes
> Here's the core of our disagreement, I think: you seem to think
> that there is no difference in kind between what the ancients did
> to create such things as agriculture, writing, masonry, and so on
> and the "modern" techniques of science, and that what scientists
> do is no different from what, say, engineers or detectives do.
Yes.
> Perhaps the difference is more one of degree than kind: a detective
> or an ancient bridge-builder can afford to take shortcuts and make
> bold inferences and work with likelihoods, while the modern
> scientist has to be more careful and comprehensive to eliminate
> all the possible bad hypotheses.
There is a lot of modern science, it seems to me, that proceeds
by bold hunches and torpedoes be damned. I'm thinking right now
of attempts to isolate a particular nucleotide sequence, or the
development of some new techniques in that area. It does seem
true, though, that the extreme care and comprehensiveness of
which you speak---and which, in your last email you mentioned
by way of statistical analyses---does not find a ready counter-
part in ancient science.
Still, Euclid and the philosophers were pretty penetrating when
it came to eliminating bad hypotheses.
> But I still think /something/ is different in kind about
> rigorous critical epistemology and ordinary human reason,
> even when the latter is used with care.
Do you mean that modern science often shows signs of "rigorous
critical epistemology", or just that the practitioners are
often rigorously critical? I don't quite see it.
Scientific examples of that elude me.
> While I agree that identifying that thing, whatever it is,
> with a particular description of "the" scientific method
> may lead to dangerous dogmatism, I still think there's
> something there,
Say a few more words, and I might see it.
> and it's related to self-honesty and self-criticism.
Well, I don't think that anything at all has changed since
the time of the Greeks on that score. I mean, the Greek
philosophers were as sophisticated as are we about that,
basically. Yes, you are right about science: they didn't
seem to be critical towards their scientific pronouncements,
and indeed that is what *does* characterize the last few
hundred years of Western science. Maybe that's what you
are talking about---maybe it's this renaissance attitude
that is carried on today in science that people are trying
to refer to by "the scientific method".
But if that's all it was, then I'd say that it was about
time that the scientists started acting like the medieval
architects, boat builders, and all the other people that
got anything done had been doing for some time.
Lee Corbin
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