sciences in general, what they are and their methods
This post relates to the previous post here, as well as posts on light conventions here and here. There comes a point in science in which a convention needs to be adopted in order to avoid confusion and ensure consistency. The tendency, however, is to think that the convention adopted is real, that is, that […]
The worldwide list of dissident scientists: Critics and alternative theories by Jean de Climont (Assailly Publishing, 2016) compiles 40 lists of dissident scientists from around the world and finds 8000 of them. This is a remarkable challenge to the assertion that scientists are in agreement about scientific theories. Synopsis : This directory, available exclusively in
A school of thought is an approach to a discipline by a group of people, especially one that develops its own vocabulary and intellectual tradition. There are many schools of thought in the humanities and soft sciences, including historical sciences. There are fewer schools of thought in the hard sciences, but they exist there, too
This post follows others written about Occam’s razor here and here and here. The flaw of Occam’s razor has been identified: the parsimony it privileges is biased against qualitative explanations and in favor of quantitative explanations. Here’s a simple example: “the hypothesis that the damage to my lawn was caused by 12 rabbits is less
This post continues other posts (see here and here) on the relevance of Aristotle’s four causal factors. Call the higher causes the final and formal causes, and the lower causes the efficient (mechanistic) and material causes. Aristotle argued that the upper causes are more important. Early scientists argued that we couldn’t know them regarding nature
This continues a previous post on Occam’s razor, which it was pointed out is a principle that is arbitrary and biased. With what should it be replaced? Every science has at least two schools of thought. These reflect well-known tendencies to ascribe more significance to one of two contrary explanatory factors. For example, there are
I previously wrote about pluralism here. Science is usually considered monist in various ways: there is one scientific truth, one scientific reality, one scientific method. This leads to having one scientific theory for each subject, if at all possible. The single scientific method is the easiest to critique: each branch of science has its own
In 18th century the sciences started to become more prestigious and influential than the humanities. In the 19th century this led to a realignment of modern thought and society as scientists (a new term then) took the dominant position within the universities and high culture – in the place of clerics, philosophers, jurists, historians, poets,
This continues posts on history and science (see here). Uniformity is the background for history: what everyday life is like, what is constant in a culture. But history focuses on what is unusual or unique because that is the key to differences between people and places and periods. It is the unusual or unique that
The week before Christmas is a good time of year to write about miracles because it’s a time to be reminded of the meaningfulness of miracles. But what about their truth? Doesn’t the uniformity of nature make miracles impossible? Thomas Aquinas said a miracle is ‘beyond the order commonly observed in nature’ (Summa Contra Gentiles
