[UA] Re: [UA]

[Andrew]

Friday, June 15, 2001, 2:51:03 PM, Nick wrote:

NW> Science works like a logical syllogism.  It takes two statements and makes a third.  The first is the general, "The future will resemble the past."  The second, specific statement is your
NW> evidence for a particular case, eg "the sun has always risen in the past".  Finally, you get a result, ie "the sun will continue rising in the future, unless something changes".  

NW> Now, it's impossible to have the conclusion of the syllogism be one of the premises (you can do it, but it's circular and therefore an invalid argument).  So you cannot have a scientific evidence
NW> to support the claim "the future will resemble the past".  You can either accept it as an axiom (ie, on faith) or you can believe it possibly wrong, and therefore doubt the entire scientific
NW> framework (as I do, though I tend to think the chances small but non-zero).  

Drifting towards the sunset of detopicalisation, you could approach it
by saying
"The future resembles the past" and "point X in time resembled point
X+1" in time (where both X and X+1 were in the past).  After all, one
mans future becomes the same mans past eventually.

I still say that we're building models, and if the models cease to
work, we just build new ones.  Should the concept of modelling cease
to work, we'll have much bigger problems than arguing about science.

Andy D
____  

It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua