On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 02:03:49PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: > On 2/17/2014 1:55 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 05:33:48AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: > >>Russell, > >> > >>All of science assumes an external reality independent of human > >>observation. > >Who says? I must have been asleep when they announced this in Physics > >101! Actually, I'm pretty sure they never did. > > I'd say science assumes that we can agree on observations. The > success of this hypothesis is generally taken as evidence for a > reality independent of human observation. >
By whom? That is a serious question. Of course, some scientists might speculate about this down at the pub, and certainly there has been some discussion along these lines on this list, but in everyday science, everyone is trained as a positivist, and tends to act as such, which is probably a worse syndrome than naive Aristotelianism. The notion that there is a real reality there, with solid things like tables and stones to stub your toes on has taken such a drubbing since the beginning of the 20th century, that most everyday scientists usually just focus on mathematical descriptions of phenomena, and leave it at that. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
