"John Collier" <colli...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote:
I am not sure that these “dogmas” are not merely working hypotheses that have served well.
But there is some reason to think scientists (if not science) can be dogmatic. A colleague and occasional co-author of mine is one of the world’s experts on Douglas fir. He submitted a grant application noting that he had found variation that could be explained neither by genetics nor by environment, and he wanted to explore self-organization during development. This is a commonplace now, but thirty years ago he failed to get the grant because his referees (not Douglas fir experts) said that he just hadn’t looked hard enough for a selectionist explanation.
John Collier
Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
From: Gary Richmond [mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, 01 June 2017 11:19 PM
To: Peirce-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:9235] Rupert Sheldrake TED Talk
John S, list,
John S wrote: "As Peirce emphasized and nearly all scientists agree, nothing is a dogma of science." Well, I would certainly agree that nothing ought to be a dogma.
And yet Peirce railed against "the mechanical philosophy," materialism, necessitarianism (recall his response to Camus in "Reply to the Necessitarians"), reducing cosmology to the nothing-but-ism of actions/reactions of 2ns, etc.
Certainly not holding dogmatic views is an ideal of scientific, but I do not agree you in that it seems to me that any number of scientists in Peirce's day and in ours as well yet hold them, whether they would say they do, or think they do, or not.
Late in life, Peirce concluded the N.A. (not including the Additaments) by writing that even "approximate acceptance of the Pragmaticist principle" has helped those who do accept it:
". . . to a mightily clear discernment of some fundamental truths that other philosophers have seen but through a mist, and most of them not at all. Among such truths -- all of them old, of course, yet acknowledged by few -- I reckon their denial of necessitarianism; their rejection of any "consciousness" different from a visceral or other external sensation; their acknowledgment that there are, in a Pragmatistical sense, Real habits (which Really would produce effects, under circumstances that may not happen to get actualized, and are thus Real generals); and their insistence upon interpreting all hypostatic abstractions in terms of what they would or might (not actually will) come to in the concrete. . . . "
(CP 6.485).
It seems to me that Peirce is clear--and while here he seems to be addressing philosophers in particular, elsewhere and frequently he argues this for science more generally--that many thinkers (philosophers and scientists alike) do indeed hold such dogmas as "necessitarianism" and "mechanism" (==Sheldrake's slide for dogma #1 "Everything is essentially mechanical). That Peirce's views were far from dogmatic follows for me from his theory of inquiry including his pragmaticism.
Again, I don't necessarily agree with Sheldrake's list of putatie dogmas, and I would certainly fully agree with you if by "nothing is a dogma of science" you mean that this should be an essential maxim of the ethics of science. But just as Peirce argued that every scientist has a metaphysics--even as certain scientists argue against metaphysics altogether, that everyone of them ought take pains at discovering what are her perhaps hidden metaphysical presuppositions--I think that even those who claim that "nothing is a dogma of science" (but, I must quickly add, certainly not you, John) still many yet hold certain dogmatic views, and that these can enter into even whole 'schools' in certain fields of scientific endeavor.
Best,
Gary R
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 2:34 AM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote:
On 5/31/2017 10:48 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
I agree that #3 is not a dogma of science.
As Peirce emphasized and nearly all scientists agree,
nothing is a dogma of science.
John
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