| | Thirty-nine sanctions so far, including my own, and yet, no one offers any discussion. Knowing that Joseph Rowlands is an Objectivist, I read the article through that filter, and I accepted it as a nice summary of what we all believe to be true. Reading it as if it were offered by someone who is not an Objectivist changed much of the meaning. Many statements became putative. Eventually, it all fell apart.
I chafed at his masculine pronouns. I know the rule of grammar, but I try to write around it, often using "they". Yesterday, on my blog, I reviewed Monsters of the Id: Science is Mankind's Last Great Hope ("man" again), a documentary about the 1950s science fiction movies that inspired a generation of scientists. To make a supporting point, I picked an example from Them, and said:
Perhaps the essential characteristic of the scientists of the 1950s film – also not mentioned in Monsters of the Id – is that they are generalists: “scientists.” Dr. Patricia Medford (Them) was an entomologist, just as we met physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians. However, each of them was an artesian well of information about anything that needed to be explained at the moment. Science is not an object or a subject, but a method. While other people rely on faith (superstition) or force (the military solution), the scientist reasons from facts and tests her hypothesis.
Also on my blog is a review of She's Such a Geek! Women Write about Science, Technology, Other Nerdy Stuff. (I previewed that with an earlier post, "You only have to be better to be equal".) The fact is that today, here and now, more women than men graduate with science degrees. The times they are achangin' But I understand the default grammar, so I read past it the first time. I stopped at the obvious error of "that" for "who." So, Rowlands was not being grammatical: he was being a guy. (I had no problem with his starting a sentence with a conjunction: "Because reality is objective." I accepted that as a rhetorical device.)
Why pick at these little problems? We all make mistakes when writing passionately online. Grammar defines how we think. It matters. And this was an Article, a serious posting, not an ad hoc or ad lib argument. If he was writing emotionally - I like the phrase "the words have blood" - then perhaps his reasoning was not as tight as it first appeared when I knew that I would agree with it. It was not.
You cannot prove the validity of induction. That is the very problem of induction, much discussed here. Rowlands's comments in those exchanges were suggestive and insightful. Here, he was in error.
A scientists who takes all of this for granted and plunges into philosophy will not appreciate the fact that he is making assumptions that may not be true. He won't grasp that he can't legitimately prove a point if he's unintentionally assuming it. A scientist that proves induction is real by pointing at all of the real world examples of how we gained knowledge from it would be one such example.
(Ignore the subject-verb disagreement. You cannot proofread your own writing.) A scientist would not attempt to prove induction. She accepts it. On the other hand, philosophers do investigate it.
Moreover, I believe that an inductive approach to the problem of induction is valid because tautologies are identities. The scientific method itself can be tested via the scientific method. A is A.
I believe that the many errors in formal philosphy all stem from the same failure of not engaging the scientific method. Rational-empiricism (objectivism) is the only complete and correct method for solving any problem from picking groceries to finding a spouse. Reality is real.
Rowlands's thesis (as I understood and accepted it) was easy to agree with. Scientists pass over philosophy as useless because much of it is. Science eclipsed philosophy in the Enlightenment, when science stopped being "natural philosophy." Perhaps that, too, was an intellectual error. Perhaps science should have claimed natural philosophy and left the German and English universities to their unnatural philosophies.
Over on MSK's OL, in a similar discussion last night, I made the point that painting was challenged by photography. (So my art history professor said.) No longer able to represent better than the camera, artists explored impressionism, expressionism, dada, and so on. However, that is not entirely true. The Academy school delivered positive, heroic, uplifting, and fulfilling paintings of real people, or of "realistic" representations, there being no gods or angels.
So, too, with philosophy, did the self-proclaimed mainstream deny reality and our ability to know it, rationally, empirically, or entirely. However, not all was lost. Although Paul Feyerabend was hired by the University of California Berkeley in 1958, something else was happening in New York City.
Ayn Rand's approval of "bootleg Romanticism" embraced science fiction. She was a fan of Star Trek (the original series). Science fiction often takes on the problems of philosophy, especially epistemology and metaphysics. Scientists never really abandoned philosophy. They just stopped wasting their time in university classrooms where they were not welcomed.
In Rowlands's weakest claim he falls into a false dichotomy.
Based on an overall moral goal, science could determine whether an action promotes or detracts from that goal. But what about the goal itself? Can science test whether the goal is real or not? True or not? No.
Certainly, the discovery of truth is science: observing the world, reasoning about your perceptions, forming an explanation, and then testing your claim. The traditional method of rational-empiricism is objectivism and Ayn Rand gave it a capital-O.
The scientific method can be taught to children as a simple five-step process. Before he died in 2012, Norman W. Edmund, founder of Edmund Scientific, created a website for his 14-step scientific method. Like the "rocket boys" of the "October skies" millions of us in that generation bought the lenses, magnets, experiments, kits, parts, and assemblies. Atlas Shrugged was written for us.
I still think that Joseph's essay was a nice statement. It was easy to agree because I already knew him though Rebirth of Reason. I think that the problem is not so much his understanding or exposition as it is the challenge of explaining something complicated in a few hundred words.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/18, 5:52am)
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