Terry
We're discussing the meaning of a particular sentence, "our understanding
of the physical world is complete in all important respects", not string
theory, or Laplace, or Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, quantum theory, or
whatever. You say the meaning of this sentence is "post-scientific" rather
than "unscientific", and I wonder why.
Of course by definition so-called "unscientific" opinions aren't able to
account for the success of science! This fact (which we know a-priori!)
doesn't go anywhere whatsoever to explain your opinion that the meaning of
the sentence "our understanding of the physical world is complete in all
important respects" is "post-scientific" rather than being "unscientific",
or being simply absurd.
Drake
From: Terry Bristol
Drake -
This is the tip of a large intellectual iceberg. So simply: the dominant
logical positivist philosophy of science is largely an exposition of the
Mechanical Philosophy resurrected by Galileo and Descartes et al. The
Laplacean version was that Newtonian Mechanics allowed an 'in principle'
supermind to predict and explain everything (viz as well as retrodict). The
Modern version has been Einstein's Unified Field Theory research program and
the later posturing about a Theory of Everything. I recently asked Brian
Greene (Columbia U, Elegant Universe; Fabric of teh Cosmos) where he though
that String Theory might be a Fully Deterministic Theory of Everything. He
said that that was the goal and expectation.
The problem with the opposite 'un-scientific' position is that it is unable
to account for or make sense of the success - limited as it may be - of the
mechanical theories (Newton, Maxwell, quantum etc.). A post-scientific
theory seeks to be able to make sense of the success of science (mechanical
theories and relationships) while rejecting the Scientific Hypothesis (SH)
that all phenomena in the universe can be understood as governed by one
(time-space invariant) order. SH is what links ancient science and modern
science - that they are both science.
Peirce and the American Pragmatists embraced the Evolutionary Hypothesis -
linked to Schiller and Hegel and so forth and again linked to ancient
theories - Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.
The Socratic Turn (cf Bartlett's brilliant Great Courses exposition) is the
same as the Pragmatic Turn (IMO) where there is a paradigmatic problem shift
from the scientific - how does the world work (necessarily fixed over time
to be 'learnable'? - to the pragmatic - how should we live?
A post-scientific, pragmatic model of reality must still be able to make
sense of the successes of the scientific enterprise - precluding a shift to
an un-scientific model.
Enough of the iceberg.
Terry
=========================================
On Aug 16, 2011, at 8:05 PM, vony wrote:
Why is "post-scientific" a better characterization than "unscientific" of
the sentence "our understanding of the physical world is complete in all
important respects." ? To my mind the proposition "our understanding of the
physical world is complete in all important respects" is absurd, Not just
"unscientific" but counter-scientific. It doesn't seem to be consistent to
any idea I have of "religion", either.
Drake
From: Terry Bristol....
'Post-scientific' is a better characterization than unscientific - methinks.
What Peirce et al are after is a More General Theory that can account for
the inherently limited success of various material or mechanical theories as
special cases.
T
=================================
On Aug 16, 2011, at 12:59 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
Steven, List,
......
While I concur that Peirce would have certainly agreed that the position
that "our understanding of the physical world is complete in all important
respects" is unscientific, ...
..
Gary
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