In a message dated 1/2/02 10:10:38 AM Mountain Standard Time,
tdavis@messiah.edu writes:
> I have made this statement several times, publicly and formally,
> before good-sized groups that have included significant numbers of
> scientists, including on one occasion a group of about 75 faculty and
> students at MIT. And not one of them objected. So I continue to think that
> scientists generally agree with what I have said.
>
I have to admit that I, too, thought that Ted's statement sounded too
postmodern for my tastes. Having met Ted briefly and heard him lecture,
however, my reaction was not to assume that he was a radical postmodernist,
but to assume that either his writing or my reading was insufficiently clear.
And now his reply has clarified things.
But it might be useful to see what in the statement struck an objectionable
note. The original statement was:
"I tell my students that scientific knowledge is determined not by
observations and experiments, but by the outcome of debates about how to
interpret observations and experiments, and that such debates can be
influenced by a variety of factors (incl. politics, religion, personality,
various background beliefs, aesthetic commitments, etc)."
I think there were two nuances that struck me the wrong way about this:
1) It seemed to give short shrift to the role of the observations and
experiments as the foundation for the debates and ultimate arbiter of
reality. Looking at the statement now, I see it really does include the
observations and experiments, but by starting with "not by observations and
experiments" the postmodern impression is planted up front.
2) There's something about the phrase "scientific knowledge." It sounds too
much like "truth" or "reality" when what Ted really means (as expressed in
his second post) is "what passes for scientific knowledge," in other words
the (always tentative) conclusions that science comes to at any point in time.
So, I would propose and endorse the following amended, non-postmodern (except
to the extent postmodernism includes recognition of the human and other
factors that keep science from being a one-dimensional march toward certain
truth) statement:
"The conclusions reached by the scientific enterprise are determined not
merely by observations and experiments, but by the outcome of debates about
how to interpret observations and experiments, and such debates can be
influenced by a variety of factors (incl. politics, religion, personality,
various background beliefs, aesthetic commitments, etc)."
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Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cats"
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