Reply With QuotePhilosophers always maintain rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.Originally Posted by ChrisOfNottingham
(Apart from that I agree with you)
"Is science a belief?" is the sort of question that philosophers ask. It might provide an interesting discussion, which is fair enough. But by the time all the philosophers have agreed on what the the answer is, science and engineering have split the atom, landed on the moon, invented the internet and cured half the forms of cancer. I don't think the answer really matters.
For what its worth, I see science as a process. You can believe in it or not but if you follow the process its science.
Philosophers always maintain rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
(Apart from that I agree with you)
'Croydon' Bob Newman. The ladies call him "Thrush" - as he's an irritating cunt.
Are you sure about that? I'd have said; It's white, of course, but you can't see a damned thing when the light's out.
I've heard it said that all cats are black in the dark. But they aren't. It's just that we can't tell the difference.
The style as we like is the humdrum.
Well, with no light it's got no colour, as colour is merely our perception and if we cant see it we cant perceive it. Objects have no intrinsic "colourdness", they merely reflect some wavelengths of light and not others, which we then interpret as colours which we give names to. You cant split the "colour" from the "seeing". Bees, for example, see flowers as diferent colours than we do. Who is right? You might as well ask what noise does a bell make in a vacuuum - none. If you reintroduce air you would hear a noise of course, but the noise you would hear would depend on the gases you reintroduced .Are you sure about that? I'd have said; It's white, of course, but you can't see a damned thing when the light's out.
I've heard it said that all cats are black in the dark. But they aren't. It's just that we can't tell the difference.
The most you can say is that in full spectrum light in air an object has a certain colour that humans agree to call "Red", "white" or whatever.
I think my assumption is that an object's colour refers to its ability to reflect light of certain colours, even in the absence of any light. You see some funny colours for cars under orange street lights and the way my brain works is that is goes, "oh, your car looks a yucky brown green at the moment but it is really red."
In what sense is it "really" red?.
An object is also reflecting light in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum - if you could see them the object would appear a differrent colour - colours our eyes and brains are not wired up to perceive, that we probably cant even imagine.
It is "really" red because over the full EM range of frequencies visible to the human eye, the ones that it can reflect are consistent with what is perceived to be red.
Outside of that range the term colour isn't really used. I know that sometimes infra red and ultra violet are referred to as colours but this is still close to the visible spectrum. If something blocks or reflects micro waves we don't describe it in terms of colours. Our notion of colour is both limited and defined by our organs of perception.
I'm sorry to disagree, but it has got a colour — which we cannot make out in the dark.
As opposed to what? Our misperception? Is it that ginger cats are ginger only when the sun is high, and then change colour at dusk to grey and at midnight to black? But we had somehow failed to spot this until our attention was drawn to the point ?as colour is merely our perception
Or are you using the notion of a thing's colour in an unusual way?
The style as we like is the humdrum.
That's true within limits, but if you didn't already know what the correct colour was, it might be rather harder to 'see' it.
It's red in the sense that, for its practical descriptive abilities, we invented the word red.
Birds, bees and fish didn't.
i think not. science is something that people believe in because it's proven. while belief is something that we don't physically believe in, but we know that it exists.
One thing I've learned from doing this MA in Photography/Fine Art is that there are many different whites, depending on the paper or other medium, and the different coatings etc. To us mortals they look white, but to a trained eye they are different. This is another case of "the more you know, the more you don't know" for me!
I recently read a book called "The Undercover Philosopher" by Michael Philips, a University Professor of Philosophy in the USA and Canada (possibly ex-professor). The reason I picked it up was the subtitle: A Guide to Detecting Shams, Lies, and Delusions.
Not much use as it turns out (unlike Schick and Vaughn's excellent primer on thinking "How To Think About Weird Things").
The only thing I remember from it now is that he thinks acupuncture is real and has been accepted by mainstream medical practice. (Some muddy water there, but the book came out only two years ago, so if he had really looked into it he wouldn't have written this chapter, instead of getting carried away with his scheme to introduce the concept of "scientism" as an over-riding "belief in science" (which shows he doesn't know what science is, to my mind... you wouldn't say that you "believe too strongly" in driving a car so that it stays on the road, after all!)
He has invented the concept of Knowledge Machines to describe the social institutions that "control" the currently accepted status quo in a particular area, such as medicine, and the criminal justice system etc. It's the old paradigm shift business from a slightly different perspective, really.
Anyway, he devotes a whole chapter to his conceit that "Scientism" prevented "science" from acknowledging acupuncture, and that a grassroots movement eventually caused science to accept the validity of acupuncture!
His ignorance is astonishing, and apparently he thinks that if some medical institutions (or possibly commercial health care provisioners etc) have been swayed by popular opinion into pandering to wishful thinking, it somehow exposes science as having been in the wrong! The complete mish mash of his thinking and research here exposes him as a bit of a fraud, to my mind, more interested in his clever construction than in the reality.
It's a shame really, because his chapter on the "recovered memory syndrome" fiascos of the 80s and 90s was quite good... but after reading this scientism drivel, I don't trust the rest of the book any more, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
I wrote him an email to a university address in Oregon that I found online, but I've had no reply. From what it says on the back of the book, I suspect he's no longer there... either that or he doesn't want to consider that he may have been wrong.
All quite ironic, considering the book's subtitle!
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks