On 2/17/2014 5:21 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 02:03:49PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/17/2014 1:55 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 05:33:48AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
Russell,
All of science assumes an external reality independent of human
observation.
Who says? I must have been asleep when they announced this in Physics
101! Actually, I'm pretty sure they never did.
I'd say science assumes that we can agree on observations. The
success of this hypothesis is generally taken as evidence for a
reality independent of human observation.
By whom?
Vic Stenger for one. Me for two.
That is a serious question. Of course, some scientists might
speculate about this down at the pub, and certainly there has been
some discussion along these lines on this list, but in everyday
science, everyone is trained as a positivist, and tends to act as
such, which is probably a worse syndrome than naive Aristotelianism.
The notion that there is a real reality there, with solid things like
tables and stones to stub your toes on has taken such a drubbing since
the beginning of the 20th century,
I'd say positivism has taken a lot more of a drubbing since Mach than realism.
The replacement of tables and chairs by atoms and then by wave functions is just changing
our best guess about ontology - it's not evidence that there is no mind independent
ontology. The fact that there is intersubjective agreement on observations is still
evidence for a mutual reality.
that most everyday scientists usually
just focus on mathematical descriptions of phenomena, and leave it at that.
But if you ask them why mathematical descriptions are so successful? Or why do we all
agree that's a chair over there? The existence of some mind independent reality is always
the working assumption.
Brent
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