Reality Thursday

Science is how we think things out
And try quite hard not to scream and shout,
We take a look
At thing, or book
And ask, ‘Can we know what’s really there?’
‘Or even, maybe, what’s right, and fair?’

We can’t pretend to have no ideas,
Or dreams or needs, or hopes, or fears.
But wanting it won’t make it so,
And old ideas must sometimes go.

Science can’t tell us how to feel,
But it shows what counts as real.
That’s a thing we need to know,
If we’re all going to live, and grow.

Extempore, and perhaps mere doggerel, with a possible contradiction between the inclusion of the humanities in the first verse, and the first couplet of the third…

Can’t decide yet whether I like it better than the earlier TMBG kid’s discs, but it does measure up so far.

It is clearly superior to Here Come the 123s. I think Here Come the ABCs is the best album, but Science has the best song (“Why Does the Sun Shine”). That song also has the best video – theremin-playing cartoon cats rock.

Ah but to be completely true to the TMBG position: should the prize not really go to a song/poem in favour of your favourite philosophy of science that contains a logical contradiction?

Incidentally, just to be clear: my target was clearly Realism with a capital ‘R’: what Hilary Putnam calls ‘Metaphysical Realism’.

aaron–
phaedo 99e.

Quoth Putnam, “Hey, metaphysician!
Come hear from my Polish Logician!
You say we are two,
you and I, and it’s true-
but we also are one, by addition!”

(I’m kind of violating the premise since I’m actually no fan of Putnam.)

Ginger Yellow @2: I had thought (hoped) that the E was a piece of bacon, but the video makes it clear that it’s some sort of rock.

Alex @1:

“‘Or even, maybe, what’s right, and fair?’…Science can’t tell us how to feel” does appear to be a contradiction — but if you noticed this, did you perhaps have a consistent alternate reading in mind? I don’t see any hope for the first line — it should become: “But absolutely not, never, what’s right or fair.” But the second one might work as: “Science can tell us why we feel.”

Kid bitzer @8:

Wouldn’t the Platonic approach be to ask whether science consists of the forms (the real “things”) or thoughts/intellectual intuitions about the forms (probably not statements, since they qualify as images)?

Chris @10:

“Plato seems to have failed to anticipate is that the difference between observations of reality and reality is dependent on the techniques of observation—which are capable of refinement.”

But Plato’s point is grounded on the fact of a gap between observation and observed, and not on the size of that gap. It’s that I’m looking at a photo, not that the resolution is poor, so technique doesn’t solve it. (You’d have to have direct intuition of the real to measure the actual rather than relative difference between more and less refined techniques of observation. Or, as Nietzsche puts it: you can’t look around your own corner, no matter how sharp your eyesight.)

My philosophy of science song was written by Laurie Anderson: “It’s a sky-blue sky… Let x = x.”

A Limerick for Computational Epistemology

Science finds a normative naturalist foundation
Where logic meets mechanism in computation
Whose relevance to Man
Is supplied by an aught implying a can
And to truths we may converge without termination.

Observe the poor word “paradigm”
With which nothing else seems to rhyme
Except the short phrase “spare a dime”
Found by John Holbo just in time

(Not apropos of anything really, but I love Stevens and the thread made me think of the title of this beautiful late poem of his:)

Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

@19: Thanks for the Stevens poem. The last two lines are especially good, imo.

Auntie says I’m made by God,
and the moon landing was a fraud,
but when I go to learn at school,
my teacher says that that she’s a fool
and that astronauts are really cool
and I think that’s probably true,
but not as much as I do
think that one and one is two

“oh, one and one is two,
I’m pretty sure that’s true,
’cause if you doubt it, then there is
nothing you can do”

Dr. Quine says spiders
have got it figured out
as they wait inside their webs
they’re in the middle looking out
and once they’re done with logic,
they will not scream or shout,
but use their web to crawl a ways
to suck bugs’ juices out

“oh one and one is two”

so when I’m asked, what will I be
when I am thirty-two or three,
doctor, lawyer, or may-be
a ventriloquist,
I will say whatever it is,
I’m sure to be a pragmatist

“oh one and one is two…”

And Dr. Quine, he has a dog,
double-u, v oh,
it says that empiricism
is the way to go
but Dr. Quine says, wait Spot,
you are partially correct,
but don’t think that all knowledge
is like your Labradory set
and Spot gets sort of grumbly
but doesn’t ask just why,
but Dr. Quine is patient,
and lets his sleeping dog lie.

“oh one and one is two”

Grr. sassifrassin rassintassin preview…

Waving hands,
Spiral staircase,
Schemata!

That does not quite do it, but what do you want for ten syllables. ;) I did not address a 5-8 year old, either. But I would do that primarily with drawings or games, not with words, anyway.

I think that Piaget basically got it right. Ask someone to describe a spiral staircase, and nearly everyone will use their hands, because their understanding is not verbal. Like all knowledge it is mostly verbal/mathematical, but also includes actions, perceptions, and judgments. That is not to say that it is real. ;)

BTW, this theme brings back painful memories of reading Sartre. Often I would suddenly realize that something he had said 100 pages earlier meant the opposite of what I had thought. One such misunderstanding concerned scientific laws. I originally thought of a scientific law as a set of observations, like the meaning of “mother” as the set of ordered pairs, {Eve – Cain, Barbara – W, . . .}. But Sartre meant a verbal/mathematical statement. Les Mots, indeed! ;)

Yo, kids! Listen up! Here’s the deal:
Forget what you want, how you feel.
Put things to the test.
Keep what works. Fuck the rest.
What works is, in practice, the real.

Normally we would see finch soup through the window
As the redheads make merry in the birdbath
But they’re all flown.
Shouldn’t I make a stern face and shout, or wield a toy gun
To make the hawk depart?

Science is not all it’s propped up to be, but, at least, it doesn’t govern by decree, and it’s therefore open to both you and me!

The last “therefore” may well be philosophical – still, it’s the only one that is not merely whimsical.

Hi John. In the video, the contrast is between science, which is “real,” and things like fairies and unicorns, which are “not real” (although stories about them are still enjoyable). I presume that this doesn’t mean just that science, as a social practice, exists. Instead, the point is that science isn’t just a bunch of crap we made up; instead, it is grounded in observation, tested, and can be reliable. This is fairly thin notion of ‘real,’ compatible with a large range of metaphysical positions, including the fairly instrumentalist positions expressed by, Scott Martens 10.02.09 at 9:51 am and bad Jim 10.02.09 at 8:09 am.

Regards,

Tim

Well… having laid out an instrumentalist position, albeit a rather elderly pre-Popperian one associated with specific and discredited (but sorta Epicurian) schools of thought, let me play devil’s advocate to Tim. Consider two scenarios:

1. I’m always losing my keys and I think mystical, practically invisible creatures called gremlins are doing it. I believe gremlins to be short, so I attach a hook on the wall next to the door and systematically hang my keys there every time I come home. After that, I have no trouble finding my keys.

2. I’m always getting ear infections and I think they’re caused by microscopic, practically invisible organisms called bacteria. I believe bacteria to have cell walls with distinct chemical properties that can be disrupted by certain distilled by-products of molds, or synthetic equivalents. I take doses of those chemicals regularly and my infections go away.

Let’s further muck about with the scenario: In order to confirm my theories, I stop using the hook by the door and lo and behold, I start losing my keys almost immediately. I stop taking the antibiotics and my infections still go away. Ergo, gremlins are real and bacteria are not.

Now, you can tell me that the reason I stopped losing my keys was because I started putting them in a fixed place everyday and the reason it made little difference if I took antibiotics or not is because my infections were probably caused by viruses rather than bacteria. But, I could respond that you’re making just-so stories. In fact, I rarely lose objects in my house, and you’d think I’d be finding keys at random all over the place if I was just forgetful. And telling me that antibiotics aren’t doing anything because what I really have is viruses is akin to claiming that I’ve stopped losing my keys because there are no gremlins, only kobolds steal keys and they’re scared of hooks.

Children routinely have beliefs that are not very different from the belief in gremlins outlined above. Their belief in germs is no more well-grounded than their beliefs in monsters under the bed. To be honest, I kinda shuddered at that video, because singing “science is real” sounds to me a lot like “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”. Children are not so clear on the ontological significance of claims about what’s real and what isn’t, but they generally have some understanding of what love is, so I suspect the hymnists are ahead on that one.

It is genuinely difficult to convince people that science isn’t just ideology, political correctness and personal ambition when the phenomena it discusses are remote from day-to-day life and when they want to believe otherwise, just as it is incredibly easy to convince them that science proves some prejudice they already possessed no matter how flaky. I came from exactly the kind of background that was sceptical of evolution but couldn’t even imagine questioning the virgin birth, and Dobzhansky’s argument for evolution is the one that I found convincing: Once you engage with a larger body of knowledge about the world, you find that nothing in biology makes sense without common descent and at least some aspects of natural selection. The most substantial argument against gremlins is that their existence makes no sense in light of a larger and more complex world, while the argument for bacteria is that vast amounts of modern medicine, epidemiology and microbiology make no sense without them.

Dobzhansky’s view may be compatible with a variety of metaphysical positions. It is totally incompatible with Carnap’s positivism, and certainly with the rather naive hypothetico-deductive approach described in the video.

@ garymar

Elegant
Hypotheses?
Nasty facts?
Algorithmic
Complexity!

Brother, can you spare a dime?
No, just Kuhn and his paradigm.
Science is what Scientists do
Not the fairy tales of how and who.

A human activity, nobler but like any other
With Priests and Sacred Texts refereed by a brother
Revolutions and paradigm shifts , but mostly Normal
With a Logic and Philosophy, very Formal.

This thread fills my heart with love for the human race

We think the scientists do science
And nature just sits there and poses
In fact, without a firm alliance
Of man and thing there’d be no gnosis.
The line between the S and O
Is dotted and moves to and fro.
It’s like what happens on a date
If you get lucky and you mate.
We get inside of nature’s pants
Because the lady wants to dance.
Or to make the selfsame point
Without alluding to your joint:
Science happens
As much in things as in the mind
Else the naked eyeball of our pride
Would be definitively blind.


Though it's Popper I studied in college,
Falsification didn't acknowledge
Statistics, his terror.
So, he didn't write "Error
And The Growth of Experimental Knowledge."