Nicholas Thompson emitted this, circa 09-06-23 10:42 AM: > Perhaps in my first response to this thread I should have distinguished > clarity from verisimilitude. Let's imagine a situation in which my > understanding of some situation .... say consciousness .... is vague. Do I > sometimes advance the discussion more by advancing a more precise > formulation than I actually can justify?
Obviously the answer to that is "yes", because you included "sometimes". [grin] Sometimes you progress the discussion by being overly precise and sometimes you regress the discussion by being overly precise. I think one immanent problem with modern science (immanent to modern science but not to science writ large) is the tendency to be unjustifiably precise. Such over-precision does a criminal amount of damage to our ability to lay out what we actually know from what we think we might know. The over-precision is done for many reasons, some of them altruistic and some nefarious. The climate change and abortion debates are examples with overly precise (arrogant) rhetoric on both sides of each. Now, I'm NOT a scientist; so what I say holds little water. But I think it's the obligation of scientists to _avoid_ being overly precise, even if they _posit_ that being overly precise will progress the discussion. And if/when they launch into an unjustified extrapolation, they should loudly, emphatically, and repetitively shout that they are speculating and have no reason to trust what they're saying. Similarly, they should be able to be just as precise about their ignorance as they should about their knowledge. If you don't capture your ignorance just as precisely as you capture your speculation, then you are an irresponsible speculator. ;-) > On sober reflection, I guess I think the answer is sometimes yes and > sometimes no and that a lot of wisdom is required to know what rule applies > to a given discussion. I do believe the the power of a dialectic, in the > intellectual energy that is generated when two clearly stated ideas contest > over facts. But I also think that wonderful things can happen when a > thinker truly and honestly describes his confusion. You set that up as a dichotomy and it's a false one. One can simultaneously be clear about one's ideas _and_ describe one's confusion about those ideas. But this is all just an aside. The real point is that there is no single method for approaching the truth. Often, the best method is an INDIRECT one, as with parallax, paradox, koans, etc. But often the best method is direct, as well. (To boot, we almost always end up equivocating on the word "best"!) So, I'd have the same criticism if someone fixated on the conviction that riddles are the only or best way to communicate. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
