Phil Roberts, Jr.  wrote:

> John Edser wrote:
> > 
> > PR:-
> > You've overwhelmed me with your unimpeachable arguments.
> > 
> > 
> > JE:-
> > Was that said tongue in cheek, or for real?
> > 
> > I am not here just to try to win arguments, 
> > my intention is to attempt to defend the 
> > integrity and the dignity of the sciences; 
> > evolutionary theory, in particular.
> > 
> > I simply cannot understand how "academics"
> > allowed the decay of epistemology over the
> > last 50 years. Worse, I cannot fathom why
> > almost nobody here seems to care. Popper still 
> > stands as THE shining light in a growing post 
> > modern Darkness. Just look at the utter mess post 
> > modern epistemology has made of evolutionary 
> > theory....
> > 
> 
> The folks I have cited (Bhaskar, Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend, Manicas
> and Secord, Harre, Brown, Hanson, Polanyi, etc., have absolutely
> nothing to do with post modern reconstructivism, a decidedly
> philosophical bent.  The fact that the criterion of certainty
> has been abandoned in favor of the more realistic criterion
> of reasonableness has nothing in common with the thesis that
> pretty much anything goes (post modernism, as I understand it).

In analytic philosophy this is most often associated with the so-called
Gettier counterexamples, where something that was justified (made
reasonably certain) true and believed was not knowledge. But the attack
on the idea that knowledge required certainty was best made by
Wittgenstein in _On Certainty_.

Postmodernism is a kind of "anything goes", but it is easy to overstate
this. Caricatures don't help. Some postmodern views have a fairly good
grounding in things like social and conceptual relativisms.
> 
> They have arrived at their conclusions
> from simply taking a much closer look at the way various scientists
> actually came to their conclusions and discovered that it had little
> if anything in common with the views of the positivists, which most take
> to include Karl Popper.  Few if any were concerned with testability,
> which is more in the domain of technology.  What test did Einstein
> propose with the publidation of his 1905 paper (don't confuse with
> Eddington's later experiment).  According to his biography, relativity
> was
> an outgrowth of his disatisfaction with the assymetry in some of
> James Clerk Maxiwell's equations (not the null results of Michelson/
> Morely, as common thought).  In other words, he was driven
> by AESTHETIC concerns (explanatory elegance).  When asked why Pauli's
> model of DNA couldn't possibly be correct, Watson's remark was
> "Because.  It wasn't beautiful".

Popper was most certainly *not* a positivist, and few who know the
history of 20thC philosophy would take him to be one. His abandonment in
philosophy of science and epistemology comes from the recognition that
falsificationism, even when made sophisticated, simply fails to account
for much of epistemic dynamics.

But to leap from that to aesthetic claims for knowledge is to equally
misrepresent things. Elegance is a test based on parsimony, which is a
guiding principle in empirical science. If something is adequate to the
task and elegant, then it is to be preferred to something that is
elegant to the task and baroque. Elegance is not a test of ideas, but a
filter that enables scientists to narrow down the range of feasible
ideas, for logically speaking thereis no end to the number of feasible
ideas otherwise.
> 
> The difference between modern
> views in philosopy of science and those of folks like Popper is
> they actually went out and observed how science was being done.
> In other words, they applied the techniques of empirical science
> to the study of science itself, something you claim to favor.
> The result was the falsification of falsificationism.
> 
Sometimes. There is a classical example of siologists of knowledge going
into the field and ignoring the science in favour of the "power
relations" or "institutional structures and functions" etc. One such
happened where I work (before I got there); the scientists (rightly)
failed to understand why they even bothered and just didn't visit some
Papuan village instead.

> Again, don't confuse me as arguing that testability is of no value.  Its
> a HIGHLY VALUED epistemic tool, the gold standard, as a matter of fact.
> Its just that its not the only one available, and rarely of concern when
> first formulating hypothesese.

Arguable. One thing that is uppermost in the minds of those I know is
whether or not they can adduce experimental evidence for a novel idea.
Typically, they devise an experiment. Many do not work out, and the
ideas are dropped, even when they put a lot of work into it.
> 
> PR
> 
> BTW, John.  On what page of 'Origins' will I find Darwin's
"test" proposed?
> Are you sure he wasn't at least a bit concerned about the
> impracticalities of a test that might take several hundred thousand
> years to accomplish?  I know he cited human animal breeding, but that
> would be an observation rather than a test and, as such, of no value
> to an erudite scientist such as yourself.

Darwin's tests were manifold. Some of them involved finding adaptations
that served other species, or the lack of a feasible pathway for the
development of *any* organ or arrangement over evolutionary time. Since
on of the major explananda was the arrangement of groups within groups
in taxonomy (explained by common descent), the existence of cases that
did not meet this would be a test of the universality of common descent
(and with lateral transfer and studies on hybridisation, Darwin's thesis
*has* been substantially modified since).
> 
> The real test of evolutionary theory is whether or not organisms behave
> as if reproductive fitness were their primary concern.  For some stragne
> reason you can look at the 9/11 terrorists and convince yourself that
> these guys look perfectly ok to you.  Given this, I'm curious as to
> just what an organism would have to do before it finally got around
> to getting your attention, before it finally appeared to have failed
> the "test" for what we should expect to find in a naturally selected
> world?

Reproductive fitness is not now and hasn't been since Wright began
publishing in the 1930s, the sole test of evolution. This is a classical
overselectionist mistake.
-- 
John Wilkins
"And this is a damnable doctrine" - Charles Darwin, Autobiography
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 5/29/03 9:17:22 PM