Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM: > Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would assert that > science is the only procedure capable of producing lasting consensus. The > other methods .... various forms of torture, mostly ... do not produce such > enduring results. N
While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the meaning of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance exhibited by the many meanings of evidence within science is wide enough to cast doubt on the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science. And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ... deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even personal epiphany. Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence as there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an orthogonal partial ordering in each dimension. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella This body of mine, man I don't wanna turn android ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
