On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Jessie A. Morris <[email protected]> wrote: > On Monday, June 10, 2013 15:20:13 Nathan England wrote: >> >> Interesting. I agree with what Charles said, my only concern is the >> scientist who crafts the experiment to prove his hypothesis in a particular >> situation. >> >> Example: >> >> I believe that if I close my eyes and I cannot see something, then it >> doesn't exist. I can see and hear my children playing in the background. >> When I close my eyes I cannot see them, but I can still hear them, so they >> exist still in theory. But if I go to a quite dark room where I can no >> longer hear my children, when I shut my eyes, do they still exist? >> >> Obviously, this is a stupid example, but the point is I can craft an >> experiment to prove my children do not exist. > > More important is not that you can create an experiment to prove your > hypothesis, but that you can create an experiment that disproves that > hypothesis. By disproving it in a verifiable way once, all of your "proving > evidence" has been disproved.
This is one of the few sort-of coherent threads in this whole mess, but still sadly misconceived. Science gathers evidence both for and against hypotheses. Scientists are generally bright people, and tend to understand the limits of their experiments and the possible sources of error. Even if the ones doing the experiment don't, there are generally plenty of others willing to criticize their work, especially if it looks like it might upset the status quo. This is another thing that's often confused about the motivation of scientists. They would mostly really *like* for the status quo to get upset, because that tends to open up exciting new fields of research, and they get to be in on the "ground floor" so to speak. It's just that they realize the status quo in most areas has a lot of evidence backing it up and little unexplained evidence against it, so it takes some solid work to convince them that things really aren't that way. Much of this discussion falls under the general idea of epistemology--the study of what it means to know things. It may sound like a dubiously abstract thing to study, but it's really at the heart of the debate that's going on. Of course, there are a couple of participants that are very clear on where they believe knowlege comes from (though they seem to have forgotten some of the more unpleasant parts of their source book), but in general it's a more difficult subject than it may first seem, and also a very important one to anyone who wants to found their personal ethics in logic and reason. Logic only gives useful results when your foundational axioms are sound, and even then you must still move things from the realm of pure ideas and logic into the real world, which is a tricky thing. That is not the only way to think about ethics, though. Hume, in particular, approached his study of human moral judgement in an observational capacity and developed a theory of 'moral sentiment' that actually has foundations in how people actually make their judgements rather than how he thought they ought to. From an epistemological standpoint, he was very skeptical; he argued against the logical validity of the 'principle of regularity' that would allow us to logically conclude that nature is static and will behave tomorrow exactly as it does today. He doesn't argue that we shouldn't believe such a thing and act in accordance; just that the belief itself is due to our regular experience and not logic itself. In fact, he argues that reason alone has no power to motivate us for good or ill; that comes from our emotions and passions, and logic and reason are by necessity secondary to the force of our emotional sentiments. On the other hand, he spent a lot of time on the "is--ought" problem, in which he observed that although we may gather all manner of observations on what "is", there is no way to logically derive what we "ought" to do from them, and therefore compel others based on that reasoning. Likewise, although we may develop well-founded ideas about the way the world works from science, it will never definitvely prove anything in the logical/mathematical sense. I think that Hume's elaboration of the is--ought problem is something that anyone interested in both science and ethics ought to study, because it places some pretty clear limits on the influences that those fields of study can have on one another. No matter what we discern about the structure of the universe, from quantum interactions to the movements of galaxies, it will not give sure direction on how we ought to behave. For that, we must look inward and around us; to ourselves, our families, our communities, and the people of the world. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
