Not to me. Note my use of “approximation.” How does this work? Here I follow
Noam Chomsky, who in one of his earliest works, suggests that we approach
science as engineers, paying attention to inputs and outputs. He then describes
three models:
1. Facts go in, Truth comes out. This is not how science works.
2. Facts and a theory go in, a decision Right or Wrong comes out. This is not
how science works.
3. How science actually works. Facts and at least two theories go in. The
output is a judgment that’s given these facts, one theory is a better fit than
the other. The judgment is debatable and all theories are, ipso facto,
tentative, pending more facts or better ideas.
What constitutes “better fit” is also debatable. The simple stories we are told
— Copernicus discovers that the Sun is the center of the solar system; Kepler
discovers that planetary orbits are elliptical instead of perfect circles;
Newton’s law of gravity explains the elliptical orbits; Einstein’s relativity
explains an unexpected difference between the predicted and observed orbit of
Mercury—become a good deal messier when we take a closer look at history.
My favorite example is from Michael Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of
Modern Science. In this work, Burtt asks how, besides being solar centric,
Copernicus’ theory differed from Ptolemy’s. Copernicus’ theory was,
mathematically speaking, more elegant. Since, however, it retained the
assumption of perfectly circular planetary motion, it, too, required epicycles
to account for the observed retrograde motion of planets. Its elegance lay in
requiring fewer of them. What about fit with observable facts? Ptolemy’s theory
did not predict stellar parallax. Copernicus’ theory did—and stellar parallax
would not because it could not be observed until the invention of the telescope.
There is no denying that, historically speaking, scientists and philosophers
have striven to discover Truth, to, as Newton put it, read the mind of God.
There is not evidence at all that Truth is a necessary condition for scientific
progress.
Cheers,
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 25, 2019, at 8:51, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Today’s truth is, if an improvement, a better approximation of reality than
yesterday’s. Kepler improves on Copernicus, Newton on Kepler, Einstein on
Newton.....physicists continue to seek better theories. Meanwhile addiction
to final solutions leads to one horror after another.
Would you claim these statements are false?
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 25, 2019, at 8:29, adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
<palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
as my american colleagues would add,
we'd have to agree to disagree
truth is truth and not the end of the querying public.....
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 3:28 PM John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Au contraire. Nothing else does. Working is what pragmatism is all about.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 24, 2019, at 23:24, adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
<palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
no doubt heidegger the black forest turd had a philosophy of language?
dewey tried, in the quasi cited word of s morgenbesser
pragmatism works in theory, in practice doesn't
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 5:52 AM John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Deducing politics from philosophy can be a tricky business. In (I recall,
I could be wrong) The Philosophy of Social Hope, Richard Rorty observes
that Heidegger and John Dewey, whose politics were radically different,
had similar philosophies of language.
Cheers,
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 24, 2019, at 22:43, Torgeir Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear all,
Rarely has there been a greater occasion to cherish Plato's insights
in the Republic than when Heidegger's schwarze Hefte were published.
As Arne Næss had noted already during the later part of Heidegger's
career, the man had turned to poetry, and, as Plato informed us
thousands of years earlier, poets should not be trusted in matters
political. Now, with regard to Heidegger's brief, but significant,
career as one the the Third Reich's official harlots, we have no
disagreement. Even Heidegger himself might have concurred to it.
However, when it comes to accusations of charlatanism, we should be
wary of those who resort to sloganeering in lieu of proper arguments.
A relevant question here is whether the entirety of Heidegger's corpus
was tainted by his brief alignment with official Nazism, so that
anyone who reads his texts inadvertently becomes a bit of a Nazi
himself. This topic was recently discussed in conjunction with the
publication of Heidegger's Notebooks, his schwarze Hefte. Now, do the
schwarze Hefte actually confirm Heidegger's anti-Semitism and
continued fidelity to the Nazi project? We tend to agree with Slavoj
Žižek here: things are in fact "a bit more complex." Let us allow a
longish quote:
"The volumes show that, after 1934, Heidegger effectively cultivated
more and more doubts about Hitler and the Nazi regime; however, this
growing doubt had a very precise shape of blaming the enemy. What
Heidegger reproached Hitler for was not the Nazi stance as such but
the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to technological-nihilist
Machenschaft, becoming like America, Great Britain, France, and Soviet
Union who are thereby always MORE guilty: 'all well-meaning excavation
of earlier Volklore, all conventional cultivation of custom, all
extolling of landscape and soil, all glorification of the "blood" is
just foreground and smokescreen —- and necessary in order to obscure
what truly and solely is: the unconditional dominion of the
machination of destruction.' Heidegger’s critique of Nazism is thus a
critique of the actually existing Nazism on behalf of its own
metaphysical 'inner greatness' (the promise of overcoming modern
nihilism). Furthermore, Heidegger’s growing reservations toward the
Nazi regime have nothing to do with the eventual rejection of its
murderous brutality; far from denying its barbarism, Heidegger locates
in it the greatness of Nazism: 'National Socialism is a barbaric
principle. Therein lies its essence and its capacity for greatness.
The danger is not [Nazism] itself, but instead that it will be
rendered innocuous via homilies about the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful.' Incidentally, the same debate went on at the beginning of
modernity when Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Renaissance Catholic polyglot
humanist, accused Martin Luther of barbaric primitivism —- true, but
Luther’s break nonetheless opened up the space for modernity."
So, with regard to the potentiality for Heidegger as an open
philosophy, we note with Žižek that
""Heidegger’s edifice cannot be reduced to some Nazi core -— it would
be absurd to dismiss Left Heideggerians like Caputo and Vattimo as
closet fascists or as cases of a simple misreading of Heidegger:
Heidegger’s edifice is genuinely 'undecidable,' open to different
political readings. There are even some black activists in the US and
in Africa who, in their reaction to the Black Notebooks 'scandal,'
insisted how a reference to Heidegger helped them to formulate their
resistance to global capitalism and its ideological hegemony. And the
ongoing attacks on Heidegger aim precisely at closing this
undecidability and proving not only that Heidegger’s thought is in its
very core Nazi (an 'introduction of Nazism into philosophy,' as the
subtitle of Emmanuel Faye’s book on Heidegger says), but that the
shadow of the same suspicion also falls on all who were influenced by
him."
The quotes are from Slavoj Žižek, "The Persistence of Ontological
Difference," in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: responses to
anti-Semitism, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny (New York:
2017), p187-188 and p190.
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld
https://torgeirfjeld.com/
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