Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Apr 05, 2013; 7:10pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Fwd-New-post-The-Loud-and-Clear-Message-that-the-TED-Controversy-is-Sending-tp7582434p7582534.html
Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical
pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that has
had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have gotten
trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years, and therefore,
I think, worth digging up and dusting off.
I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be, whatever
produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as glen would point
out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ...
experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds. But
Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ... a
consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus that
mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to turn to the
methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to conduct our search
for the truth in the future. He would agree that such advice is provisional
... fallible is the term he would use ... but he is contemptible of anything
that smacked of Cartesian skeptism. Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a
matter of fact. Doubt is not something we entertain (except as sophists);
it is something that is forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try
to resolve in favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what
we "can" doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look
at which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we will
see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about
which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological.
Nick
The Village Pragmatist
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED
Controversy is Sending
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
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