From: Jonathan B. Marder (jonathan.marder@newmail.net)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 13:53:33 GMT
Hi Rick, Sam and all,
> > SAM (quoting Pirsig)
> > No objective scientific instrument can distinguish a President of the
> > U.S. from anyone
> > else....
> >
> JONAMTHAN
> > IMHO this is quite wrong. The simplest "scientific instrument" is human
> > observation. [.snip] if you were to film the US President with a group
of
> > advisors, but blank out all the faces, I think that there would be still
> > be clear signs of which one was the President.
>
>
RICK
> IMHO this is quite spurious. First off, I think its pretty clear that by
> "objective scientific instrument" Pirsig is referring to NON-COGNIZANT
> things like measuring devices (rulers, scales, and thermometers) and
> observation aides (microscopes, telescopes, etc). He's simply saying that
> there's no ruler you can hold up to a person that will tell if that person
> is or is not the 'president of the US'.
I think Rick's is a naive view of science and instrument, one almost
universal in those with no experience of scientific research, but also
common among scientists themselves.
Instruments are AIDS for human observation. Telescopes and microscopes don't
see anything for themselves!!! It takes a human to "read" the thermometer.
An X-ray diffractometer doesn't "see" atoms - the human interpreting the
results does that. If Pirsig says that gravity didn't really exist before
Newton (as he said in ZAMM), then by the same argument, atoms didn't exist
in any sense before Demokritos, and in the modern sense only in the last 150
years or so.
Undergraduates often take the view that "real" science is the results spat
out by complicated instrumentation. My experience is that some of the best
science involves intelligent observation using extremely limited
instrumentation. What instruments do you think the following scientists
used: Mendel, Darwin, Archimedes?
> Notice, Jon, that to find an example of an "instrument" that can detect a
> social pattern you had to cite a human mind (which you mind-bogglingly
refer
> to as a "simple" scientific instrument). But human understanding is far
from
> mere observation. It is the end result of an on-going interactive process
> of observation, deduction, and induction. That an ape is an 'alpha male'
is
> not an OBSERVATION. It is a CONCLUSION based on numerous measurements
Maybe I erred in saying "simplest". What I really meant is most direct. When
it comes down to it, many observations are in fact conclusions. When I say
that I read the thermometer and the temperature was 21 degrees celcius,
practically everyone
would consider that to be an observation. It is in fact a conlcusion, and a
wrong one if the thermometer was faulty!!!! When it comes down to it,
eveything is a conclusion - a static pattern of quality constructed by the
human mind to represent a dynamic experience of quality.
Jonathan
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