A collaborative search for wisdom, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond...
"The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-William James
I met Kuhn once. I really don't think we can lay "Denialism" at his feet. From "science can never achieve absolute, objective truth" it simply does not follow that "Reality is unknowable"... his point was that what we can know at any given stage of scientific inquiry depends in part on what we're open to discovering, and that scientific "paradigms" tend to close us off from unfamiliar or (ahem) novel phenomena. So, our knowledge of reality is partial and fallible but also, eventually, growing (because eventually self-correcting). We can't just open the book of nature and read it, we have to keep editing ourselves by inspecting our paradigms and the assumptions that have embedded them in our thinking.
"When one learns to think differently about these things, if one does, the question of right and wrong will no longer seem to be the relevant question."
I really like this quote from the article. It makes me think of how divided our political systems are. It would help if the "left" and "right" sides could work together more instead of just feuding as they seem to do more than anything else.
I met Kuhn once. I really don't think we can lay "Denialism" at his feet. From "science can never achieve absolute, objective truth" it simply does not follow that "Reality is unknowable"... his point was that what we can know at any given stage of scientific inquiry depends in part on what we're open to discovering, and that scientific "paradigms" tend to close us off from unfamiliar or (ahem) novel phenomena. So, our knowledge of reality is partial and fallible but also, eventually, growing (because eventually self-correcting). We can't just open the book of nature and read it, we have to keep editing ourselves by inspecting our paradigms and the assumptions that have embedded them in our thinking.
ReplyDelete"When one learns to think differently about these things, if one does, the question of right and wrong will no longer seem to be the relevant question."
ReplyDeleteI really like this quote from the article. It makes me think of how divided our political systems are. It would help if the "left" and "right" sides could work together more instead of just feuding as they seem to do more than anything else.