ignore method
Kay Neich
Archived quick and rough comment on Feyerabend material : -
<a fellow poster wrote a potentially elucidatory comment in a message in
reply to me in my usual newsgroup, and I hope
it's ok for me to draw upon further>
Kay Neich wrote:
http://www.galilean-library.org/int6.html
(i succumbed to temptation and posted. pls excuse)
then try :
http://www.galilean-library.org/feyerabend.html ...
then pls let my sorry ass get back to work at making it known how a
stronger case for ensuring a rationality can be made through awareness of
such
arguments concerning demarcation.
well, not THAT ambitiously, just in "guidebook terms" for people who'd much
rather be out in the field anyway, so-to-speak.
admittedly goofing off esoterically again.
----------------
ok in a nutshell. From http://www.galilean-library.org/int6.html
-
"Thus the demarcation problem: what factors characterise science?
It seemed that the ideal solution would state that science consists of
x, y and z but creationism (or whatever) doesn't; therefore, creationism
isn't science and shouldn't be on the curriculum. Some philosophers, though,
warned either that this wasn't possible (Lakatos and Feyerabend in
particular) or that it would backfire (Laudan). Due to the former, the
latter is what happened: science was defined according to a few flawed
criteria, leaving creationists the task of adapting their ideas to
fulfil them and hence giving birth to creation science, so-called."
-------------------
He wrote:
> Creationism isn't science because it isn't capable of being proven
either true or false.
--------------------
I wrote:
I'd agree in the plainest of terms, but there are ways I've seen used to get
around this by neodarwinists themselves when biological structuralists like
me (as a
student) call them up on it. You can only call on the
hypo[thetico-]deductive
method to reject a hypothesis constructed from within a theoretical
perspective,
not between perspectives, and neither the failure to reject nor the
rejection of a hypothesis can support the perspective used to generate any
hypothesis in the first place, strictly speaking. I can see, therefore, how
creation fuckwits can also be convinced of having wormed their way out of
how actually immune they are to falsification in a similar way.
If you look closely, I believe I'm not actually allowing any such leverage
to be given as to entertaining if so-called creation "science" has any merit
at all. I've changed the whole terms up for argument completely, and still
have no reason for anything supernatural to be invoked. My focus can still
remain on attempting to interpret and thus acquire an understanding of
repeatable and/or measurable phenomena and processes that I hope others also
see worth in apprehending.
So am I really left with only arguing values against values, or am I left
also with a means of helping to reveal more of the world that I know we
can't get to through any other means?
If yes. So What? If no. So what, again.
Coming to grips with how values inform the questions people ask, would also
yield much more scope, than just leaving any barrage of "facts" as though
these will always be organized and interpreted by others in the same terms.
I envisage a scope where at least biases have been acknowledged enough not
to then be wielded as excuses avoiding addressing what yields the most
rewarding questions.
Once value judgments are conceded to as being part of deciding what
questions we ask, and on which grounds we can accept answers, we can then
make a case encouraging people to a perspective, where demarcation criteria
cannot be used to distinguish this from another.
It may first require broaching a certain nihilism that needs staring in the
face.
Haven't argued my case well here at all. This is a very very very incredibly
sloppy outline with illdefined premises and terms at every corner.
---------------
Yes, and I can spell 'hypothetico-deductive'. I'd be shooting myself
actually, if I couldn't.
<just notes for closure which I was writing anyway>
I smell a bit of pragmatism in what I wrote on Sat night when read too
quickly, but all ok, even if that indeed is what it can be taken as. Coz I
damn well strongly insist on using the hypothetico-deductive method, of
course, as an everyday tool in my field, bloody oath. Allowing some
awareness of what is governing the questions asked, isn't necessarily
manipulating an inquiry pragmatically into "just what works for us". That's
exactly one of the reasons why the hypothetico-deductive method is so
incredibly vital when used as an integral part of normal science. It feels
stupid to have to say so, but that's the apparent ambiguity left hanging
that I get from hanging out with
philosophers.
Moreover, I think it's just the "tool" thing that's making me edgy as if it
is a reversion to blindless pragmatism, as if, explaining how things work is
all that is necessary, but that is an absolute confusion of conceptual
methodology with subject material.
Pah! Don't try that at home.
thanks,
k
--------
<for open archival purposes & to be clear - have been looking at Polanyi
more than Kuhn focusing in on how different uses of the word
"incommensurability" itself has been applied to the chasm between
structuralist and functionalist biology, and how lots and lots and lots of
descriptive ecology can be rescued. Am finding how to retain a lot of the
good from data considered to be "purely" empirically obtained, and how it
can still be approached in the
very applied field of mammalian pest management if not just conservation
ecology, which
takes so much background theory for granted on so many levels. This makes
programmes incredibly susceptible to flip out and meet the public only at
extremely dogmatic levels, not on ones that can be adopted in all sorts of
terms and yet still making it clear that good vigourous science must be
insisted upon whatever else the public decides>
--
- Kay (http://geocities.com/kayneich/)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kay Neich
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