I did enjoy it quite a lot. The guy who wrote this must be a kind of Renaissance man because he is well versed in domains that are normally miles apart in contemporary Academia. It is also quite entertaining. The novel form softens the dryness of purely theoretical argument.
I do not think it is fair to say that Kuhn "discarded" truth. He just observed that the scientists of his day had abandoned any claim to truth. When Kuhn wrote, Quantum Mechanics was in its heyday and theories could spring up and be discarded in a matter of years, if not months. In such a context, it is Niels Bohr worldview that had clearly triumphed over Einstein's. Gone were the days when physicists could claim that they had an intuition of reality. They just tweaked mathematical models of increasing complexity (hence obscurity) and selected the version that fit the experimental curves the best.
Kuhn did not do much more than capture this new mood. He just brought the awareness that scientists no longer thought in terms of "reality" or "truth" to a wider audience. In fact Bohr had been saying these things since the 1930s but they were not well known outside Physics circles. Just as importantly, Kuhn is not alone. The "anthropology of science" movement of the 1970s and 80s is less well known than he his but it largely confirmed his insights based on painstaking ethnological fieldwork (guys sitting with paper clips inside labs for months and writing down everything scientists said to each other).
That is ok of course but you can't say that K9's position is baseless. On the contrary, It rests on very solid ground indeed. Kuhnian epistemology is still the gold standard of the philosophy of science.
No one (neither K9 nor Kuhn) ever said they
distrust the scientific method. On the contrary, they both argue that trust-building is at the heart of it. This is how Kuhn portrays this method:
- At first, a theoretician, irked by some minor inconsistencies proposes a new theory of subject X. At first, the theory is marginal. Few people believe in it because the established theory about X seems to give correct predictions in most known cases.
- Then new experimental results accumulate in which the inconsistencies noted in one become more and more frequent. The established theory about X is in trouble.
- An increasing number of experimenters, alarmed by the problematic results start to focus on the inconsistencies and design experiments specifically designed to determine if they are experimental errors or something more serious.
- In a flurry of activity, new experiments are conducted. Their results definitely show that there is a problem with the established theory about X. Furthermore, some experimenters start to claim that their results match the marginal new theory proposed in 1. This this is the moment of "crisis" described by Kuhn.
- A mass of new experimental results comes in, confirming that the new theory of X is better than the old one. A new consensus forms around this new theory.
Step 2 is a form of loss of trust. The old theory of X is becoming bankrupt. Experimenters are losing faith in it. In 3. and 4, it is the opposite process: trust buildup. The new theory of X is earning trust among experimenters.
The fact that this process is messy and "social" and has to rely on trust is because experimental results are never clear cut. They are always "up to the n-th decimal" or "within a certain interval of confidence". That is why nobody noticed that Newtonian Mechanics was "wrong" for such a long time. The differences with Relativity was buried well beyond the accuracy of the measurements, given the speeds and masses at which the experiments were usually conducted. As a result deciding whether a certain measurement fits with the theory involves a certain amount of discretion on the part of those involved. Outlying values can always be dismissed as "measurement errors". Also, the relative competence of experimenters, and the way these differences are perceived, plays a big part. Some experimenters are better at avoiding "measurement errors" than others, but no one knows exactly to what extent. You can only guess and such guesses are a matter of trust.
All this insight into the actual working of the scientific method, keeping in mind that all this is well corroborated by ethnological observation, gives a strong support to the idea that
the scientific method itself owes more to trust than to truth.
"pure nonsense"? I think you should refrain from such outbursts. "Social constructs" are not all bad. It is not because new genders are bad social constructs that all are. It seems to me that when humans cooperate it is necessarily through some kind of social construct. To begin with, language itself is a social construct. Or, as Wittgenstein would, it is a language-game, with rules that have been collectively elaborated over time. Every human activity involves myriads of such language-games, i.e. social constructs. Why would science be an exception?
You can think of science as a form of high-performance craftsmanship and then there is no problem in explaining why it can make predictions about the physical world. Humans have evolved in the physical world and are thus good at making use of it. "Making use of" and "making predictions about" is one and the same thing. Scientific theories are just high-performance cooking recipes; "If you do X, Y and Z, then you will get A, B and C" Humans have been doing such things since they started using tools and talking about it.
On the contrary, considering science as part of normal human social interaction seems to me the most natural
prima facie position. Making science something exceptional seems counter-intuitive to me. The important question here is why you are tempted to find such scientific exceptionalism more natural. There is a hidden assumption here that you are not making explicit (maybe involuntarily).
Philosophy is definitely not immune from human opinion. It is a part of the humanities. There are degrees of acceptance, degrees of conviction that can indeed be assessed through polls. Again, I have the impression that you would like to have some magic way to get out of the uncertainty. I am not aware of any. That is the human condition. We just don't know what is going on and so we make guesses of varying credibility. Philosophy is like that just as everything else in life.
It is not a trivial attack at all. Again, as I said earlier, the whole of Western philosophy moved away from Metaphysics during the XXth century precisely because most philosophers had realized that metaphysics was just a bunch of supernatural nonsense. K9 attack on truth as a supernatural belief is in keeping with that position and very well supported by its major works, like those of Wittgenstein and his students, for example. Quine's "web of beliefs" is another.
If it is so "easy" maybe it is just warranted.
Because no one has succeeded in rescuing it from that swamp. Again, it is not for lack of trying.
Outburst again. Please don't do that
Maybe these ideas are correct. I have the strange impression that you are almost envious of him ... that you accuse him of "cheating" somehow.
Realism, Physicalism, ... all these are metaphysical positions (positions about the
nature of reality). Once again, Plato's doctrine is called "Platonic realism" for a reason. Whether you consider ultimate reality to be "ideas" or "physical matter" makes no difference in that respect. Whatever option you choose, it is still a
metaphysical option.
Everything we talk or think about is a concept by definition. How can "reality" not be a "concept"?
How can you not realize that by claiming that something is "independent of sense perception" you are placing that thing in a supernatural realm? It seems to me that there is a consensus that anything that cannot be checked with the senses is woo-woo. So our grasp of "reality" must go through the channel of the senses somehow (maybe indirectly through instruments). But then it is subject to the frailties of the senses (as they are radically exposed by the brain in a vat objection).
This is pretty much Kant's reasoning when he denies our capacity to "know things in themselves". You seem to be trained in philosophy. I don't understand why you find this so difficult to consider, at least as a potentially valid argument.
It is an argument against our capacity to
know reality. Of course there is "something" out there for the brain in a vat to exist but the brain in the vat will never
know what it is and yet its experiences will be indistinguishable from ours. Like Kant's "
ding an sich" argument, it very strongly supports the position that the nature of reality (and thus our capacity to formulate true statements about it) will always elude us.
If it is "unreachable through the senses", then it is unreachable full stop, unless you believe in super-sensory woo-woo (like Plato does).
Instruments are just extensions of our senses. They are not different from them. An electron microscope can see smaller things than our naked eye can. Ok, so now we have a better eye. But our electron microscope does not see reality more than our senses do. If we are a brain in a vat, we will use a simulated electron microscope and we will make the same error about the situation we are in as with our eyes.
On the contrary, it seems to me that placing trust at the center
solves the problem of truth.
Abandoning a superstition is not a loss, it is a progress.
YOU said that what K9 was doing was not fine. I am not saying that you cannot defend the position that science is about truth but K9 defending the position that it is actually about trust is ok too. As I made it clear already, I am leaning in his direction.
It is anything but. This is a theoretical assumption that can be revised at any time.
Not if you believe Kant. Not knowing the "ding an sich" means that the complete picture will
never be seen.
We
don't know what reality hides behind redness. We once thought it was some wave in Ether, then that it was small particles hitting our retina, now it is "both a particle and a wave" but tomorrow it could be a string wriggling in 18-dimensional space and the day after that something completely different.
It seems to be a safe bet to assume that none of these constructs corresponds to "reality". They are just theoretical metaphors that help us do ever more accurate calculations, i.e. predictive craftsmanship. That is all.
[UWSL] to see how he was going to do his careful philosophy but, maybe ghosted ?[/UWSL]
