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Alan Forrester

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    Alan Forrester

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  1. You are right, only information filtered by the retina goes into the brain, where it is processed still further. So I understated the indirectness of our knowledge about the world. I do not reject the notion that we can learn about reality. I said that we cannot uncritically assume that our current ideas about reality are right. And I should just like to ask, what properties does knowledge have that theories that scientists have critically discussed and submitted to experimental tests do not have? I don't see how it can be a mistake. Scientists want to learn about reality, which somewhat presupposes that they don't know everything about it. So I can only conclude that you must have given up on: (1) Universal scientific theories, i.e. - theories that are attempts by scientists to explain some feature of the whole of reality: Einstein tried to describe gravity across the whole universe with General Relativity, Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists have tried to describe how life evolves across the entire universe and so on. (2) The correspondence theory of truth, i.e. - a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to reality. (3) The law of the excluded middle. If you give this up then presumably you think Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity can both describe reality at the same time and so on and so forth. Of course, you would then have destroyed logic altogether and you would not be able to have sensible discussions.
  2. Yes, it means consistent with a particular purpose and that purpose may be wrongheaded. And people use the word rationality to denote lots of different ideas. If you want to use a different term then come up with one.
  3. You don't seem to be terribly well acquainted with Popper's ideas about epistemology. Suppose that a scientist can't find any facts contradicting a particular theory in the solar system, then if he points his telescope elsewhere he may see facts that contradict his theory. for example, until recently astronomers assumed that gas giants could not exist close to stars because they could not form close to stars, but as they have observed gas giants close to stars their theory must be wrong and they are trying to come up with a new theory that accounts for all the facts. Similarly, any theory a scientist holds may be wrong and he may later observe something that refutes his theory. So no finite set of facts can confirm a theory but a finite set of facts can refute a theory as a matter of logic. Now, a scientist may also wrongly interpret the information he sees in his experiments. For example, scientists are currently embroiled in a debate about whether or not fossils discovered in Flores are Homo sapiens or Homo erectus. At least one of the groups must be wrong. Worse still we see everything very indirectly, light hits our eyes, goes through the lens to the retina and then into the brain. All of the information we have about the world is composed of electrochemical signals in the brain. That information has already been filtered in such a way that it can mislead us about the world. For example, some orange light stays orange when you pass it through a prism but other light splits into red and yellow light, so our eyes conflate these two physically different kinds of light. So all of our ideas about the world are interpretations including experimental results and observations and so on. We actually learn about the world by spotting problems with these interpretations (a clash with experiment or with a more abstract theory), proposing solutions to these problems, criticising these putative solutions and then spotting problems with these new solutions. Popper argues that science consists of theories that can be subjected to experimental tests. That is, electroweak theory might predict that under certain circumstances we should expect to see a pi meson with such and such a probabilty. If we do not see a pi meson with that probability under those circumstances then electroweak theory would be in trouble. Of course, if we do the experiment our detectors might malfunction or the hardware or software of the computers we use to process the results might fail. Creationism is not scientific because God (if he exists, which I think he doesn't, but that's another story) could have made the world any way he liked and so there is no possibility of testing creationism. A theory may be true and still make predictions about what would happen in an experiment that we could test. The General Theory of Relativity might be true and if it is then light going past the Sun will be bent by a certain amount and we might see the effects of that bending. So even if it is true a theory may still be testable and so may still be scientific. More generally, Popper recommends that we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas. And the reason why we may be wrong is that there is such a thing as objective reality and our ideas may not correspond to it. Critical argument is not arbitrary nor is truth.
  4. I can tell you how I respond although my position isn't an orthodox objectivist Randian position. First, I disagree with Rand's epistemology although I agree with many of her moral positions. I think Karl Popper and W. W Bartley were right about epistemology. That is, people are fallible and they learn by noticing problems with their current ideas about the world, then they propose solutions to those problems and criticise them until there is one set of ideas left, at which point they notice a problem with their new set of ideas and so on. People may criticise a practical idea by trying it out and showing that it doesn't work as well as other ideas. What does this have to do with socialism? Well, the people of whom you speak think that it is practical for the state to provide charity by taxing people and then spending their money on their schemes to help the poor. However, government officials can be mistaken like everyone else and so their schemes might be poorer than other ideas that people could try to help the poor. We cannot find out whether they are mistaken except through critical argument and usually we will not be able to settle the issue except by trying out different ideas. And of course, some people may think we ought to spend more on the poor or less on the poor and the only way to settle that issue is, again, through critical argument and trying out different ideas about how much people ought to spend. However, if the government is stealing from people to support its own schemes it restricts our ability to discuss and try out different ideas.
  5. In economics rational action simply means that each individual action is self-consistent. So a bricklayer will not attempt to simultaneously put concrete on a brick and remove it. However, people can change their ideas. The bricklayer may decide after putting concrete on a brick that he ought to take it off for some reason. And of course people may misunderstand the world and hold two mutually inconsistent theories which happen to prompt him to take the same action in a particular situation. For example, a man might be a socialist and believe that individuals ought to be free to do what they want as long as he doesn't examine both beliefs in detail at the same time. This might lead him to help an old woman across the road and think of this as his individual choice to help her as well as thinking that he is being a good socialist an helping a poor person. Of course this man would be a bit stupid, but lots of people are a bit stupid.
  6. The gauge is just a description that is useful under some circumstances. The observations that supposedly prove that the Aharonov Bohm Effect exists can all be explained in terms of the electromagentic field without bothering with the vector potential. The AB paper makes idealisations that don't work in real life, like an infinitely long solenoid and the approximation that the charged particle's wave function doesn't penetrate the solenoid when in fact it does. Michael Berry has some papers that explain it here: http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/research/theory/...blications.html
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