On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Jon Johanning wrote:
> Aw, Miles -- give me some credit for intelligence and a basic knowledge of
> science, why don't ya? The reason I mentioned Newton's Law of Gravitation was
> not that I am ignorant of Big Al the Curly-Haired and his world-renowned
> theories of relativity. It's because I was talking about the solar system,
> and general relativity is of no relevance to a region that small. In fact,
> NASA uses Newton's physics to put its satellites, rovers, and other cute
> thingies wherever it wants, and if Newton is good enough for NASA, he's good
> enough for me! Relativity becomes relevant when you're talking about huge
> distances, very fast velocities, and huge masses, like black holes. This is
> similar to quantum theory, which is not relevant to objects roughly on our
> scale, but is when you get to very small regions.
Do you see that this contradicts your argument? We use Newton's laws not because they are the immutable, absolutely correct laws of motion but simply because--they work. (Score one for the pragmatists!)
> But if you want to substitute ol' One-Mug for Sir Isaac in the argument I
> gave, be my guest. It doesn't change the argument a bit.
You're not getting it: if you're willing to replace Issac, you must be willing to replace Al in the future, and then the stuff you assume is an unalterable, immutable law of nature today is in fact contingent human knowledge. (If our knowledge and what we call the "laws of motion" change over time, how can our understanding at any one point in time be considered the complete representation of the patterns that exist in the universe? Don't you have any faith in future scientists to improve on our current understanding?)
> At any rate, if you recognize that Einstein's theories are an improvement in
> some sense over Newton's, you are agreeing with me that the change from one
> scientific theory to another is not completely random and arbitrary, as some
> people think, but is in fact some kind of progress. The philosophical
> challenge is to account for just *how* it is progress -- a very large topic
> in philosophy of science.
I agree that change in science is not random and arbitrary, and I don't know anyone who makes that argument (straw man?). --I don't see the philosophical challenge here: it's progress because scientists discard old ideas on the basis of new research, measurement techniques, and theories. --If you want to say this progress allows us to more and more closely approximate "the way things really are", you're engaging in wild speculation: all we have is human understanding, so we cannot compare our human understanding to how things really are to verify that we're more and more closely matching reality with our scientific models. --A pretty obvious Nietzschean point, but one I've never heard adequately refuted.
Miles