Re: causation in theory

["Alan G. Isaac" <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Gleicher wrote:

> I think Jonathan put his finger on what is troubling about the critique,
> not to me but to him and I presume you.  It implies that, as mephisto says
> to the eager student in Goethe's Faust:
>
> Gray, my dear friend, is every theory,
> And green alone life's golden tree.
>
> In the context of the current discussion, there is no absolute privilege to
> the truth value of 'scientific knowledge.'

But this is just the same old rhetorical move made in
pomo discussions all the time: try to get someone to
defend absolute anything and voila, you get them
foundering on the impossibility of foundationalism.
But all that is simply beside the point.

All the efforts to provide foundations for science
arise because of the common sense observation
that something special is taking place.  We'd like
to be able to say just what it is, but every time
we try it comes to nought.  The pomo conclusion?
Deny common sense and claim its not really a
special activity.  It is special because it gives us
usable handles on the causal structure of reality.
(Yes that betrays my realist leanings, but those
are not crucial to the argument.)

Sometimes common sense cannot stand critique.
(The Earth is not the center of the universe.)
Other times it can, and the value of the critique
lies only this revelation.


> Is one to make some value judgment vis a vis the
> Homeric epic, the Gregorian chant and  the computer?

The special nature of scientific inquiry no more means
that it is good than it means that it is infallible.


> Aquinas explicitly states that the science of the scriptures is
> incomprehensible to those who do not already have faith that they are the
> word of God.   All the post-modern critique, or at least this aspect of it,
>  amounts to saying is that modern physics and economics do not seem, in
> that sense, much different.

And that's where the pomo critique is so blatantly wrong-headed.
Burn all of Galileo's books, and his discoveries about the physical world
will be made by someone else.  Burn all of Aquinas's books, and his
discoveries about the ``spiritual world'' are gone forever.


> As Harry Veeder writes, there are fundamental
> laws of science  that have no scientific basis.  If one does not have faith
> in them, one simply is out of the game.

Stretch out your arms and fly, my friend.
(You can do it. You can do it.)

Alan