I'm a new member of SI and have been following this thread for a number of months. As someone who's taught the history of and philosophy of science for a number of years, I finally felt brave and knowledgeable enough to offer up my two cents.
As I understand it, there is an argument about who's better qualified to explain the workings of the so-called gorilla game -- the liberal social scientists or the conservative hard scientists? Something like that? And then at one point Aristotle is cited as the champion of the rational engineers while Plato gets trashed as the guy ignoring reality and reason in his search for truth. And with Aristotle running the Engineering departments and Plato running the liberal arts departments, therein lies all our intellectual confusion?
But if the truth be known, Aristotle's the last guy you want running the engineering department, since he thought that mathematics, dealing only with accidental (and not essential)properties of the real world, was useless in our quest for truth.
Plato, on the other hand, had a pretty high opinion of math -- geometry -- and, in general, thought that the only way of really figuring things out was by the use of one's head -- the world of mere perceptions being deceptive at best. This of course is fairly consistent with modern physics -- a world in which pure observations (whatever those are)aren't that helpful.
Lots to say here. Can't explain Plato and Aristotle in two paragraphs, much less the history of science. But the upshot? In my experience, one of the biggest sources of intellectual confusion in this or any country is the failure or stubborn refusal to recognize when a dichotomy or distinction is misleading at best and utterly useless or even dangerous at worst,e.g., hard and soft science, liberal and conservative, even religion and science. It's just too easy to see differences. It's much more interesting, productive but, unfortunately, labor intensive to discover what all these various camps have in common. |
