Re: [Pen-l] The Science Arrow of Time

[Shane Mage <shmage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 29, 2009, at 4:58 PM, raghu wrote:

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(BTW, some do not consider mathematics to be a science. I do not know why.

That would be the logical-positivists? I thought that species went extinct..

If I understand it correctly, their argument was that math is only a
set of symbols and no purely mathematical statement can be proved or
disproved in an experiment, thus math has no empirical content and is
merely a language like any other..

That's another tough argument to counter without resorting to intuition..

An easy argument to counter.  No experiment can show anything without the use of mathematics both to formulate the theory being tested and to measure the results.  So since mathematics is basic to all science, the truths of mathematics would have to be  

higher truths than those of experimental science and the methods by which those truths are arrived at *more* scientific than those by which experiment-based scientific knowledge are derived.

Shane Mage

This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it

always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,

kindling in measures and going out in measures."

Herakleitos of Ephesos

_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l