Ian Murray wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>
> One of the most articulate and 'controversial' physicists in the world
> today, David Deutsch, is a staunch defender of Popper's view of
> science. A visit to his website beats passing the bong or thinking
> about Hitchens etc.
Sounds interesting, and I suppose now that you've thrown it out I'm hornswoggled into having to visit it. :-)
But pending that visit, I have one more observation on the exchanges between Yoshie and C that led up to this. That exchange in effect queries what is the foundation for falsifiability? What is the foundation for the foundation of falsifiability? ....... We are moving back towards another either/or: Either God or history. Either some set of fundamental principles fall from heaven, or the principles which at a given time we operate on emerge from struggle, from social relations. Susanne Langer, I think it was, noted that philosophies are never refuted -- they are just dropped. No one has ever refuted the Olympian Religion, but no one believes in it any longer either. No one ever particularly "refuted" Wylie or McLuhan or Fukuyama, but we don't worry too much about them any longer either. My wager, as it were, with Doug (which drives him to merely identifying my character type as the root of it all) is that Hardt & Negri belong with this company: they will never be refuted because they won't be taken seriously for very long.
I read (and reread) _Empire_ closely not to prepare arguments against it but merely to be satisfied in my own mind of its cotton-candy consistency. And it was in explaining that attentiveness to C that I apparently drove Doug up the wall. Multitude and Working Class constitute an either/or simply because the former dissolves all practical attempts at organizing anti-imperialist struggles. Actually, Hardt made this pretty explicit in an essay that Angela fwd to the list during the debate over Yugoslavia. I would guess that all serious both/ands presuppose a prior decision on a stark either/or.
Right now I have to choose _either_ to read the material at the URL below _or_ to finish reading an essay in the current _Milton Quarterly_ that just arrived today. I think I'll read the essay on Milton right now and get back to Popper & physics some other time.
Carrol
>
> < http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html >
>
> Ian