>Would Imre Lakatos be acceptable? I like Lakatos' view of science
as an
> edifice which fits better what I do at work than Kuhn or the positivists.
> However, even in Lakatos' view, one can't ignore confirmatory data as it
> is
> essential to building the edifice. And disconfirmatory evidence which is
> near the central supports of a theory is the most worrisome for the view
> as
> it will knock out major supports of the theory. I agree with Lakatos that
> peripheral disconfirmations don't hurt a theory very much (as the
> postivists would have thought). But one can use the word falsified, if a
> major support contradicts observational data.
>
>By the way, I only cited the positivists because that seemed to be
what Bob
> was driving at. As I mentioned in my note earlier this evening, I am
> aware
> of the positivist's demise. Shoot, they were gone before I did my graduate
> work.
>
Glenn, you should congratulate me. At least I finally got you
to write about philosophy.
Yes, Lakatos would be acceptable. I recall that he resurrected
the 'Duhem-Quine thesis' which noted that adjustments can
always be added to any hypothesis to keep it from being
disconfirmed. This means that falsification and critical
experimental results can always be deflected. And this is
not always subterfuge; sometimes it is good science. For
example, the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus were not
interpreted as disconfirming Newton or Kepler. Later they
led to the discovery of Neptune -- i.e. a real object.
> >In some ways I miss the old days of positivism, when as in the
> >Cold War there was one clearly-defined enemy. That enemy
> >collapsed upon itself. We are now faced with a new
> >and more complex set of questions. It would be well for us to
> >brush up on recent philosophy, because that is really where the
> >battle is, not geology or biology, as Schaeffer emphasized.
> >These philosophical issues are fundamental, so "fundamentalism"
> >in the sense of getting to the bottom of issues should be our goal.
>
>And here I absolutely disagree that the battle is in philosophy. I
call
> what most christians do 'The Retreat into Philosophy'. They can retreat
> from the observational world. They don't have to deal with any data or
> even
> learn anything in order to do modern Christian apologetics. All they have
> to do is philosophize the problems away. They never have to explain the
> data, just philosophize why the data doesn't say what it obviously says.
>
PA: The post-critical assessment that "all data are theory-laden"
should at least give one pause. What counts as "data"? Today,
most "data" are interpreted by a vast edifice of theory, as well
as by complex instruments. There is no getting around this problem
simply by insisting that all we do is look at the data.
> >If we can't present a workable scenario that matches the data, then we
> will never compete with the perceived naturalistic explanation of
> life--evolution. They have a scenario which is presented in nearly every
> science book, we christians don't have anything except philosophy and that
> simply won't suffice! The atheists are teaching what actually happened,
> THEY ARE NOT DOING PHILOSOPHY---THEY ARE EXPLAINING THE OBSERVATIONAL
> DATA!!!!!!!!! We aren't!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
You don't have to shout. Let me illustrate my concern in a
specific situation. I once attended one of Ken Ham's seminars,
in which he presented to a lay church audience about 3 hours
worth of geological and fossil evidence for a young earth.
At the break, I asked him "What amount of evidence would
it take to convince you that your view is incorrect?" He
answered that no amount of evidence would suffice, because
he presupposed that Genesis is God's word and teaches a
young earth, and then he goes and finds evidence for this.
All counterevidence is ruled out a priori. He even admitted that
this is circular reasoning, but (as Gerstner put it) he only moves
in the best of circles.
I won't bother to comment on the fallacies here; you can see them
easily. They have characterized the methodology of Morris and his followers
since the 1960's. The point is that these are logical and philosophical
issues. It bothers me that the public schools and maybe(?) most colleges
no longer require a basic course in practical logic and philosophy, this
being a capitalist democracy based on advertising and political campaigning
and other kinds of advocates. Our children are constantly being harangued
by these advocates and they are unequipped to deal with them, because
philosophy is in such a state of disrepute. No wonder they eventually
retreat to relativism.
Paul Arveson