Questioning the conventional wisdom
As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been engaged in a discussion of the correspondence theory of truth. The discussion took place on the Quick Philosophy yahoo group, where we started looking at Putnam’s book “Reason, Truth and History.” The full discussion began on Aug. 20, 2012.
Here, I will give some links into the discussion. I may say more on my own views of the topic in future posts.
Over at the Uncommon Descent blog, poster vjtorley has posed “Ten Questions for Professor Coyne.” I am not a spokesman for Jerry Coyne, and I disagree with some of what he writes. But I thought I would try giving my own answers to those questions. I’m pretty sure that Jerry Coyne would disagree with me on some of the answers.
I’ll note that there is some ambiguity on what is meant by “knowledge.” For myself, I would never claim that science is the only way to all knowledge, though it is an excellent way to knowledge about the natural world. In any case, vjtorley breaks this question into several parts.
In an earlier post, I hinted that I would discuss the two essays by Massimo Pigliucci on naturalized metaphysics. So that will be the goal of this post. For convenience, I shall refer to those two essays as NM1 and NM2.
It is not my aim here to argue that Pigliucci is wrong. Rather, the aim is to present how I look at the questions he is discussing. Partly, this is because I have rather non-typical views, and am sometimes asked to explain them. Partly, it is because I have indicated my dislike for metaphysics, and some have suggested that we cannot actually do without metaphysics. So perhaps the discussion here will help my readers better understand my viewpoint.
In a blog post last month, John Wilkins expressed concern about what some scientists say about philosophy:
What gets my gander is that Perakh, or more recently Lawrence Krauss, Hawking and Molodinow, and a steady stream of physicists, seem to think that while their own discipline is noble, authoritative and has extensive conceptual ramifications (that we should really call philosophical), my discipline is just “entertainment value”. In a rejoinder to me and others just posted, Perakh tries hard to back down from this, but it’s pretty clear that he, and his entire field, has a set against philosophy. Why is this?
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Yesterday, I responded to a series of questions for theists, answering as I would have back when I was a theist with growing doubt. This post responds to some recent questions that matt (over at the Well Spent Journey blog) has posed for atheists: “Twelve Questions to Ask an Atheist.” Some of these questions are actually relevant to the kind of issue that I often discuss here. As before, I will quote the question or perhaps an abridged version, before answering. I suggest that you also visit matt’s original post where he poses the questions.
John Wilkins has an interesting post, titled “Metaphysical determinism“, and this post will consist of some rambling comments on John’s post.
I’ll start by saying that I agree with much, but not all, that John says. I’ll be commenting mostly where I disagree, but I hope the reader will understand that there is a lot of agreement. I am making this a post here, rather than a comment on John’s blog post, because I think it will help show where I disagree with some of the conventional wisdom.
Jerry Coyne asks, “Is falsifiability a good criterion for a scientific theory?” My short answer is “No”, but I’ll try to flesh that out. Coyne writes:
The “theory” of evolution, for example, could be disproven if we regularly found well-dated fossils out of the proper order (like mammals in the Devonian, for instance), if species didn’t have genetic variation to respond to selection, or if we often found “adaptations” in member of one species that were useful only for another species (e.g., a special nipple on a female mole that was only used for suckling mice).
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The Heretical Philosopher 