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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: The Philosopher who wrote (40343)6/13/1999 4:33:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte  Read Replies (2) of 108807
 
There's more to the story than that. The temperature scale is defined at the two common phase transitions of water - and there are agreed conventions for measuring or effecting those phase transitions. i imagine the current state of the art is to within well less than a thousandth of a degree at either point.

There will be some fuzz in the scheme when viewed with a Platonic rigor. But the scheme is Good Enough if viewed from an engineering perspective - and Science and Engineering are fraternal twins imho. So the trick is to describe and define What Works.

The real, to me in a sense spiritual beauty of this arrangement is that empirical science and mathematics converge to a useful and predictive degree. We may be philosophically uncertain/ in dissent about the reality of the air we breathe, but we have some pretty refined measurements and polynomial predictive laws for that air's physical and chemical behavior. I have faith that if I strike a match in air - it will burn.
This IS a sort of faith, and I confess it.

Imho Chuzz is using the term "objecctivity" within a philosophical framework that assumes the reality of earth, rock and starlight. Within this set of eminently practical (if uncertainly Absolutely True) constraints, science is as objective as we can make it. Is this a fair formulation, my colleagues&interlocutors?
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