[lit-ideas] Re: Understanding Why Newton Contributed To Human Knowledge With A False Theory

John McCreery wrote
Don't all these conundrums arise from the premise that the world is composed of distinct categories, so that, if only the right definition can be found, the members of one category will uniformly share some property totally missing in members of another? Is not the lesson of science that what we take to be knowledge is approximations all the way down, that the world is not composed of p and ~p but of 1s and 0s between each pair of which there exists an infinite number of points and curves, some of which appear to be a better fit than others? 

I was talking about a particular conception in Western philosophy: knowing.
I set forth a condition for knowing that was neither arbitrary nor vague, unless it's always vague and indefinite whether anything is anything. If A knows that RP is professor emeritus then RP is professor emeritus. Perhaps the suggestion is that nobody can know what counts as being professor emeritus (at a particular place). This strikes me as merely idle (not on your part, John, but on the part of someone who believes that the law of the excluded middle is outdated or shown to be false! in certain instances, such as that of Schrödinger's cat).
Surely to say that the world is made of infinitely many points and curves tells us nothing useful about the world, in the way that the Earth's orbiting the sun tells us something about the world. There's a fairly clear distinction between my dog and the corner of the rug he's trying to eat. In geometrical optics there's a clear distinction between reflection and refraction; in geography a clear distinction between Paris and Buenos Aires. That there are, if this is the issue, unclear cases of x depends on there being clear cases of x, whatever x is. If something is an approximation, it's an approximation of something (a child's drawing of a circle vs. a mathematically Platonic one).
I hope that you'll look at some of the plain-spoken, non-contentious examples of knowing that I included in my response to Donal, and spell out just how they are approximations of something which one could never know in some transcendent way.
If this were a discussion of the feeding habits of dolphins, I'm not quite clear at what point a general discussion of the epistemic instability of the universe would become relevant to it; maybe there's a point at which it would, but then one would have to point that out, thereby giving rise to the hopeless but task of saying how that is made out, that is, how it is made out that such a discussion becomes relevant to the dolphin discussion just there, and so on ad inf.
I'm glad you were brave enough to wade out to try to save Donal and me from the rough waters in which we seem about to be foundering. 

Robert Paul
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