Kirbmarc wrote:Tigzy wrote:George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937:
In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
This is nothing new. The left has always been blighted by the wooly-headed lunatic fringe. I've never been able to figure out precisely why trades-unionism, worker's rights etc. has proved such a massive draw to the chucklehead brigade, but those nitwits are on that shit like white on rice.
I like George Orwell, I think that he was a great writer and a great thinker. And I think that he was right in pointing out that there are many cranks in left-wing parties and movements.
However this, and many other pieces of evidence, have led me to a conclusion: Socialism and Communism attract cranks because they're irrational, unscientific ideologies.
<snip>
Nobody knows what really works best before it's put to test in society.
Definitely need to put Orwell on my to-read list - or re-read
1984 and
Animal Farm
But certainly agree about putting ideas to a test, although there's a certain amount of
faith required to do so even if we can sort of reduce the odds with previous history and various models such as
game theory.
Kirbmarc wrote:Popper's call for the possibility to falsify theories has been rejected by later philosophers as "reactionary. Many "anarchic" or "postmodernist" loons have accused Popper of being "closed-minded" to the "anarchic" development of science itself and of society at large (I have a lot more to say about those people but it would make this post even longer).
"Other ways of knowing" have been proposed to be equally as valid as scientific knowledge based on the principles of the scientific method: this is what gave rise to bullshit-filled fields like "women's studies" or "queer studies".
While I certainly wouldn't argue that "other ways of knowing" are "equally valid", I think there is, pace Jerry Coyne, some utility in the concept. Relative to which, I would recommend P.B. Medawar's
Art of the Soluble - largely science - wherein he elaborates on the "hypothetico-deductive scheme of scientific reasoning":
I now turn to consider the history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of some of the central ideas of the hypothetico-deductive scheme of scientific reasoning, confining myself, as hitherto, almost wholly to English and Scottish philosophers and the tradition of thought they embody. Among these ideas are:
(1) The uncertainty of all ‘inductive’ reasoning and the probationary status of hypotheses;
(2) The role of the hypothesis in starting inquiry and giving it direction, so confining the domain of observation to something smaller than the whole universe of observables;
(3) The asymmetry of proof and disproof; only disproof is logically conclusive;
(4) The obligation to put a hypothesis to the test.
[pgs 142-143]
(2) It is our imaginative preconception of what might be true that gives us an incentive to seek the truth and a clue to where we might find it. ‘In every useful experiment’, said John Gregory in 1772, ‘there must be some point in view, some anticipation of a principle to be established or rejected.’ [pg 143]
The three essential stages in the process [of the scientific method?] which [Whewell] continued with deliberate vagueness to call ‘induction’ were in his [Jevons] own words,
(a) Framing some hypothesis as to the character of the general law;
(b) Deducing consequences from that law;
(c) Observing whether the consequences agree with the particular facts under consideration.
[pgs 149-150]
In real life the imaginative and critical acts that unite to form the hypothetico-deductive method alternate so rapidly, at least in the earlier stages of constructing a theory, that they are not spelled out in thought. The ‘process of invention, trial, and acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis goes on so rapidly’, said Whewell, ‘that we cannot trace it in its successive steps.’ What then is the point of asking ourselves where the initiative comes from, the observation or the idea? Is it not as pointless as asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? [pgs 153-154]
And it is that "framing of the hypothesis" which - in its
gestalt, in its inductive or intuitive leap which frequently has the attributes of a "road to Damascus" revelation - might reasonably be construed as another "way of knowing". Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that they are true - garbage in; garbage out - but I don't think the process should be dismissed out of hand. Not least because it suggests some significant and important processes happening "underneath the hood" that bear some thought and analysis, particularly from the point of view of neuroscience.
Kirbmarc wrote:The SJWs are merely the latest political result of this effort to reject any standard which has shielded some political and social ideas from any kind of reasonable criticism and has opened the door to the authoritarianism of subjective feelings.
Indeed.
