Re: more squiggly lines

[Alan G Isaac <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:27:53 -0400 Gunnar Tomasson <gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Re. the following:
> First, my "newfound desire to downgrade Newton as an epistemologist" has
> been in evidence, inter alia, on The New York Times Science Forum during the
> past three years on, say, half dozen occasions.

So why do you introduce a quote from Newton as an appeal to authority
in the area of epistemology?  As I said, you want to have your cake
and eat it too.  Next time you might want to preface your appeal to
authority with something like, "Well Newton sucks as a philosopher
but here's an out of context quote from him that supports my view."
(Of course it does not, but that is a separate issue.)

> Second.  The fact that, as E. A. Burtt put it, Newton was a "second rate"
> philosopher, does NOT mean that Newton was incapable of stating correctly
> that elementary point of epistemology noted by Mason and underscored earlier
> by Hume.

Of course you have failed to show that the quote you chose does this,
as it evidently does not.  In fact your persistent misreadings (see
Barkley's comments as well) and unwillingness to respond to a single
argument with better than appeals to authority and ad hominem is
growing tiresome.  Looking back through the emails, I see that you
have offered only a single post that includes sustained argumentation.
Particularly relevant, you have not in a single post offered an argument that
you are using the word 'explanatory' in a defensible way.

For example, in your single substantive post, in which you propose
yet another misreading of Newton, you comment:
"Equations predicated on the COUNTER-FACTUAL pre-supposition of 'the
Earth's standing still' - rather than moving about the Earth-Moon
System's center of gravity - cannot in principle be EXPLANATORY of the
true physical FACTS involved."
Now since we do not want to get caught up in your new emmendation ("of
the true physical FACTS involved"), let us agree to put the period
after 'EXPLANATORY'.  (If you want to say "of what?", let us say "of
the motion of the moon around the earth".) Here Newton was clearly
engaged in explanation.  And he was recognized for not only offering
an explanation, but a very interesting one at that.  And this
recognition, the history of science tells us, was very well founded:
the explanation was not only interesting, but very productive.  His
theory proved an important aid to understanding, and what are we going
to mean by 'explanatory' if not 'aiding understanding'?

In short, what is the "principle" that you are invoking?  As I have
repeatedly shown, the only way you can claim that Newton's theories
are not explanatory is to redefine 'explanatory' so that it no longer
accords with standard usage.  I.e., you talk a bit like the Red Queen
talked to Alice.

You seem to want to restrict the usage of the word 'explanatory' so
that a theory that is not correct cannot be explanatory.  But *why* do
you propose such a bizarre restriction? Science is not a matter of
correct and incorrect theories as much as it is of separating the
better from worse theories, where 'better' and 'worse' refer not to
the degree of approximation of god's own understanding but simply to
the extent to which they prove useful to certain groups of goal seeking
humans (e.g., physicists ... or economists).

> But, as F. A. Hahn advised me in an exchange on related issues more than
> twenty years ago - and as evidenced in your own comments - "Epistemology is
> a very hard subject."

Yes.  I can see you are having trouble grasping both my comments
and Hahn's advice to you.

Cheers,
Alan