Roger,
Speaking in my role as the Village Pragmatist, I think I would insist that your implication is incorrect that there is no purchase on the slipperly slope you describe. Your despair is premature.
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:24 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
And given exponential growth in science, who knows first hand what the variance in accepted scientific evidence actually is?
Any claims to know what science "is" and what scientists "do", for the purposes of distinguishing between science and non-science, are claims to a revealed truth, not something that anyone has established empirically. Ouch.
-- rec --
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:12 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:
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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