I got a chuckle out of "it is a belief system until it is falsified." I'm not even sure how to parse that. It'd still be a belief system, it would just be a *wrong* belief system.
Anyway. One of the things that struck me about the NY Times article is that Davies commits what I consider to be a very naïve conflation of "belief" and "assumption." Determinism, human adequacy, uniformitarianism (my own favorite "religion") and others are all assumptions that we must make in order to do science at all. If there were uncaused events, we don't need to investigate them because we will not be able to get at their causes, and that, after all, is the point of doing science. If humans are not adequate to understanding the universe, we might as well sit home and drink beer. If the laws that govern the universe are not constant, we are not creating general theories but rather mere local facts. And so on. There are a number of assumptions that we make when we undertake to do science. But we do not *believe* them in the way we believe, say, that the earth orbits the sun. We *assume* their truth for the purposes of doing our investigation but I'm not sure we "believe" them in the usual sense of "believe." I try to teach this distinction to my students. We are agnostic with respect to the truth of these assumptions, but we hold them tentatively because to do otherwise would render the entire scientific process silly. m ------ "There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." -- Margaret Wheatley -----Original Message----- From: Paul Brandon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 12:11 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [SPAM] - Re:[tips] Freud, my friend-2 - Bayesian Filter detected spam At 11:33 AM -0600 11/27/07, Rob Weisskirch wrote: In fact, I would posit that any religion is also a theory. It is a belief system until it is falsified. There's a good set of letters to the editor in today's NYT addressing just this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/opinion/l27science.html?ref=opinion -- The best argument against Intelligent Design is that fact that people believe in it. * PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Psychology Dept Minnesota State University * * 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 * * http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~pkbrando/ * --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---
