tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post7412864545146616713..comments2023-10-26T22:06:11.166+11:00Comments on Metamagician3000: Currently writing ...Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-83454007766834163772011-12-30T15:44:19.648+11:002011-12-30T15:44:19.648+11:00And off it goes! I've just submitted the piece...And off it goes! I've just submitted the piece after spending the last few days working on it whenever I could. Hopefully it will see the light of day in a few months' time.Russell Blackfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-17308713506415515622011-12-29T14:23:10.918+11:002011-12-29T14:23:10.918+11:00Arguably I'm doing that myself. :)
But I do t...Arguably I'm doing that myself. :)<br /><br />But I do think that some of my friends and allies act at times ... I dunno, almost as if they need to defend the honour of science by slapping down any idea that the it is not the whole story about how we identify true propositions.<br /><br />I think that can end up just looking contrived, and it can also cause totally unnecessary aggro as when there was a hostile response over on RD.net to a light-hearted post that I wrote about various things that I know through means that are not especially scientific. <br /><br />I can't remember what the examples were now, but one example might be that the play <i>Macbeth</i> has a character called "Macbeth". No one should freak out that you can discover things like that without using a scientific methodology, but some folks actually did get cross about such examples. In another case on Jerry Coyne's blog one commenter was upset at the idea that someone who is skilled in Shakespearean English (and perhaps I should have added in English prosody) might thereby be able to work out how to say a line from a Shakespeare play without using any scientific methodology. He or she recommended that we instead do some sort of sociological study to work out what way of saying the line is most pleasing to an audience. <br /><br />I think there's a great story to be told about what's so great about science without getting too hung about wanting to extend science to cover anything meaningful that is done in the humanities. There's a great story about what's so great about rational inquiry in general - both science and the humanities.<br /><br />There's also a story to tell about why the sciences and the humanities are continuous with each other and can draw on each other. We distinguish them for perfectly good practical purposes (particularly pedagogical ones) that should not simply be brushed aside, but they are not totally alien to each other. Where we put the boundary between them is, to some extent, arbitrary and dependent on our particular purposes.<br /><br />Again, though, telling this story properly would take a whole book, and I'm not sure that that's the next book I want to write.Russell Blackfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-44669481055044178202011-12-28T20:56:20.774+11:002011-12-28T20:56:20.774+11:00I wonder how much there is a disagreement in appli...I wonder how much there is a disagreement in application of various forms of knowledge (is science being applied incorrectly), and how much of it is just bickering over what constitutes "science".Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12460075520187803334noreply@blogger.com