BWE
Posts: 1902 Joined: Jan. 2006
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Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Sep. 10 2007,22:02) | Be sure to read Jerry Fodor's review of Consilience. I personally found Wilson's book to be pretentious, obviously inattentive to the difficulties entailed in intertheoretic reduction. |
I get the feeling that he wrote it in exasperation. He's telling the scientifically illiterate that scientists aren't crooks (mostly). He states the obvious and the outline doesn't make the point (so far).
But, like I said, I'm still reading it.From the revue you linked: Quote | It is, by the way, characteristic of Wilson's book that he fails to notice the difference between what one might call vertical and horizontal consilience. Cases of the former (the molecular theory of heat; the physical theory of the chemical bond) provide the paradigms for the unification programme. Far more frequent, however, is the joining forces of scientific disciplines at more or less the same explanatory level; and in these cases, no reduction need be achieved or intended. Rather, conjoining the experimental and theoretical armamentarium of several sciences allows explanations and systematisations of phenomena that none of them is able to handle on its own. This really is a robust tactic of scientific investigation: it's what spawns the host of 'hyphenated' disciplines that have become increasingly familiar, especially in the biological and social sciences - physical anthropology; developmental psycholinguistics; acoustic phonetics; palaeobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on. The point to notice is that when this sort of thing happens, you end up with more sciences than you started with, not fewer: developmental psychology and linguistics and developmental psycholinguistics, as the case might be. The web of causal explanation is extended; but sideways, not up and down. |
That was the same issue that drove Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- I've kind of been on a jag about it lately. dunno why.) over the edge and resulted in: Quote | While doing biochemical lab work, Pirsig was greatly bothered by the fact that there was always more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and that the number of such hypotheses seemed almost unlimited. He could not think of any way around this, and to him it seemed that the whole scientific endeavor had been brought to a halt, in some sense. This question so distracted him that he was dismissed from the university for poor grades. | (wiki)
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When wished on the morning star
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it
Look what it's done so far
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