On 10/18/2018 6:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 16 Oct 2018, at 10:00, Philip Thrift <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Monday, October 15, 2018 at 8:50:57 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
The "separation" of science from religion was the invention of
science as a way of knowing what was fact and what was
superstition. Science was testing beliefs and holding them only
provisionally.
Brent
They had myths. We have models.
"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of
science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in
the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually
imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by
definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits
comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject
that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects
and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to
believe otherwise. *But in point of epistemological footing the
physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. *
Sufficiently great difference in degree amounts to a difference in kind,
e.g. between reality and dream. Which is why Quine can live by his
beliefs in one but not the other.
Brent
*Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural
posits.* The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior
to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a
device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."
-- Willard Van Orman Quine
Very good.
Let us notice that Plato already exchange the god of Homer, for a
reality amenable to science (the worlds of idea). Xeusippes considered
that this was akin to mathematics, if not mathematics. Xeusippes
thought that Plato should have banished Aristotle from the academy,
with his propensity to treat Nature and Matter as something that we
can take for granted. The dream argument shows that this moves is
invalid in general.
Bruno
"It's models almost all the way up and all the way down."
-- Ronald Giere
- pt
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