On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 lweiger at umich.edu wrote:
> Quoting Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu>:
>
>
>> 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!)
>
> I'd think that they'd have to be close approximations to work.
No, you're conflating utility and accuracy; you can easily have one without the other! (Example: a person can safely sail around the world using the laughably inaccurate "two sphere" model of the heavens and earth.)
> If the new ideas aren't closer to reality, then we're not making progress.
To put it bluntly, this seems like nonsense to me. To make this assessment, you need to know, in some Godlike way, what reality is to verify that our scientific knowledge is moving closer to it. Are you just arguing for naive empiricism here (reality is what is what is presented to our senses)? If so, you can't escape the infinite epistemological regress: how do you know that empiricism is correct? (You can't use empiricism to verify that empiricism is correct!)
>> 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.
>
> Sure we can. Why do you think scientists make predictions?
>
> -- Luke
Again, makes no sense to me. Scientists make predictions to test their models. Are these models consistent with data? --A meaningful question. Do these models work? --A meaningful question. Do these models accurately represent reality? --Silly metaphysics.
Miles