From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 23:40:11 BST
Paul,
Since you seem to agree with me by the end of the post, I'll just go through and redesribe things from the point of view of a pragmatist.
Paul said:
Exactly, [pragmatists] have no concept of Poincare's and Pirsig's sense of "intellectual quality". So, according to pragmatists, if you put enough nice people together in a lab they will eventually arrive at the quantum theory?
Matt:
If those nice people are geniuses like Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, then yes. I don't like Pirsig's discussion of Poincare in ZMM because I think Pirsig needlessly hitches his cart to a mule that don't pull. I don't think we can get any mileage out of a pre-intellectual, intuitive sense of quality. I do think, however, that we get plenty of mileage of an undefined sense of betterness that only can be defined satisfactorily later on.
Paul said:
All I'm saying is that, in the west, broadly speaking, the "scientific method" that pragmatists don't believe in, is socially approved. For modesty, if you wish, I can limit that to the UK and my own experience of education in both the physical and social sciences.
Matt:
All the pragmatists are saying is that they've been asking what "scientific method" means for the last 100 years and they've yet to receive a satisfactory answer. I agree, people in the west do believe that "scientific method" does pan out to mean something more than a few moral virtues. But a lot of philosophers of science have been working a long time to explicate the term to really nobody's satisfaction.
Paul said:
Where did I say there is a fixed criterion?
Matt:
The only sense I could make out of asking, "If intersubjective agreement is seen as the approval process itself, it must be asked, what directs the process? What do they intersubjectively see in a theory that they agree on?" was if you were asking for a defined answer. I think for people like you and I, who both agree on "undefined betterness," it is best to leave those questions unasked, mu. So, since you asked them I interpreted them as if you really wanted them answered.
Other than that, I think we're on the same page...?
Matt
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