NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (OgreMkV @ May 28 2014,09:31) | | Quote (Quack @ May 28 2014,02:19) | I've never observed trees growing. They must do it when I am not looking. Funny how nature can do things without onlookers.
Looks like violation of the 1st law of creationism. |
This guy isn't a creationist.
So, he thinks that the growth of the tree is not a fact. It is an inference about the tree.
I still think he's being exceptionally difficult, but it's somewhat beyond me to explain it. I'm actually asking for a legit discussion, not our usual dismissal of crank comments.
Is evolution a fact or are the facts really inferences based on factual observation, that are not, in and of themselves, evolution.
He bases his commentary on Kirk Fitzhugh (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1463-6409.2007.00308.x/abstract) and I am curious if anyone else has read this and comments on it. I'm reading through it now and I think that Fitzhugh has a too narrow definition of "fact".
But that's my opinion as I write this. |
It sounds like the sort of very narrow conception of 'fact' that goes back at least to David Hume. His tale of watching a cat pass by through a hole in a fence and the lack of "guarantee" that we are in fact seeing a single cat passing continuously seems to me to be the sort of faux philosophizing that worries endlessly about whether the 'me' that wakes in the morning is the same person who fell asleep the night before. Or another variant of Zeno's Paradox. It sounds good but is ultimately sterile and uninformative.
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