From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2001 - 02:59:21 MDT
Damien writes
> Lee wrote:
>> I firmly believe that science is nothing more than
>> ordinary reasoning and common sense methodically
>> applied to certain areas of inquiry.
> Note that I'm not equating scientific methodologies with voodoo or
> postmodern cant, just saying that combining sufficient quantitative
> changes can yield a qualitative change: reasoning applied ruthlessly
> and tested by experiment can indeed produce science, but the outcome
> isn't `common' sense.
Yes, as I wrote the above, I was afraid that my "common sense" would
be misunderstood.
> Ah, then you might read Alan Cromer's UNCOMMON SENSE for another opinion.
> He develops a Piagetian analysis of why science is really quite difficult
> and massively counter-intuitive.
The elaboration of any kind of reasoning can result in enlightenment,
and the abandonment of earlier views, often even of common sense and
the intuitive. But the greater danger by far is to assume that, as
you wrote, "science is really quite different" from our ordinary thinking.
It's not. But believing that it is leads immediately to the cult of
scientism, wherein only the practiced and degree-sanctified priests
have the established authority to pass judgment on their arcane
subject matter.
> Plainly we mostly approach the world on the basis of evolved
> dispositional templates that, in conjunction with cultural memory,
> create our *folk physics* and *folk psychology*, etc: the usual ways
> humans tend to negotiate our *Lebenswelt*. One element of folk
> physics or plain common sense gives us the wrong answer if we ask
> so simple a question as which bullet falls to the ground first,
> one dropped straight down or one fired horizontally above a level
> plain at 1 km/hr.
Quite right. But even Galilean physics is counter-intuitive, at
least until one has built up the right intuitions (Galilean physics
is an advance over most folk physics). Galileo himself used to argue
the fact that heavy bodies fall no faster than light bodies (which is
non-intuitive) by suggesting that we imagine two light bodies
connected by a string. So eventually, even quantum mechanics
becomes an almost second nature, and is used instinctively by
the practiced (though we still have to give some credence to
Feynman and others who insist that nobody really should feel
entirely comfortable with it).
> Note that I'm not equating scientific methodologies with voodoo or
> postmodern cant, just saying that combining sufficient quantitative changes
> can yield a qualitative change: reasoning applied ruthlessly and tested by
> experiment can indeed produce science, but the outcome isn't `common' sense.>
Yes, but have you ever seen a counter-intuitive chess combination? And of
course we are treated every week to Colombo or some other sleuth solving
a baffling mystery by daring conjecture and the Holmesian "when you have
eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how implausible, must
be the truth". I think that we should emphasize whenever possible that
scientists employ reasoning processes no different than those of doctors,
detectives, architects, and plumbers.
Lee
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