Clutch

What are you talking about? Nobody here has attempted to "refute" Kuhn, never mind zealously.And I answered this, by pointing out its false presuppositions. One can take Kuhn's main thoughts on board -- and Lakatos's -- while holding out for a converging-on-truth sort of realism towards scientific explanation; and conversely, one can reject the prospect of "ultimate" or "universal" explanations while also rejecting Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. To whom was this little screed supposed to be a response? Surely not me, since it addresses nothing I wrote, while ignoring the point I made about unknowability being a simple logical consequence of some things' being forever unknown.

"Scientists and their cheerleaders"? Why don't you give actual quotes from actual people actually saying things likeUntil then, there is simply no reason to believe you're engaging anyone outside your own imagination.

exnihilo

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The most touching faith here is not in science, but in Kuhn.
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Clutch says:
Very wise and penetrating words indeed, I must admit.

And you say I have written addrtesses nothing!!!!!

scumble

I don't know Kuhn, but I think it highly probable that human understanding can only go so far. In a lot of scientific theory you can have very accurate result predictions, but anyone who has studied Quantum Mechanics in detail must realise there is something mysterious about the way it works.
We can make many models and use them for advancing our technology, but it doesn't mean we essentially understand much of what happens in the universe.

junkyardgod

exnihilo,

I think kuhn has been widely misunderstood. I remember reading an interview with him wherein he said something like: " I never said said we got it all wrong". Obviously, we have been getting somethings right.

As I also remember, there are 3 concepts that are important to Kuhn's work: the paradigm, normal science, and the anomoly.

With out going into detail, Kuhn says something like: Normal scinence works within the current paradigm until enough anomolies force a change in that pradigm.

As far as the limits of knowledge goes, of course there are limits.

Just adding my 2 cents.

JYG

Clutch

Actually, I didn't say that, because that's unintelligible.

I did, however, say that the following screed:...was utterly irrelevant to anything I had written, and indeed seems to engage no interlocutor whatever.

Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe you have in mind some actual person who really did say "The Scientific is in a special catagory, somehow sealed off from or impervious to the corrupting influences common to every other form of human endeavor," or something closely resembling it.

In that case, it should be easy for you to produce the actual words of someone who has defended that view. I invited you to do so, but you seem to prefer a retreat into transparent evasions. But if you'd rather let it go under the bridge, why not at least return to whatever you were thinking in your opening post, and reframe it in the form of an argument? To repeat myself: if you want a substantive reply, you need a substantive point in the first place. But what you've written so far is characterized by unclarity and false presupposition, as I've explained (though you've ignored this, again in favour of evasions.)

To take yet another example of unclarity: you allude repeatedly to unknowability without distinguishing between two utterly different meanings. You say: "there will always be a dark void of unknowing to which human capacities can never hope to understand." Or, as someone writing in English might say, It's impossible for humans to know everything.

But this is ambiguous between two interpretations:

* Necessarily, there are things we will not know.

** There are specific things such that, necessarily, we cannot know them.

The former may well be true, bu it is difficult to see why it should have anything to do with the limitations of science, since it only alludes to the contingencies of epistemic opportunity. That is, no matter what course our investigations take, there will some things or other that we never get round to figuring out. The latter interpretation is a vastly stronger claim, that there are specific things beyond our ability to know, irrespective of the time or effort or ingenuity we apply to them. This would indeed amount to a principled limitation on science, but it is very difficult to see what could constitute good evidence in its favour (though some have applied arguments from so-called Cognitive Closure here).

Now, which version did you have in mind? If the former, why call it a limitation on science? If the latter, why think that Kuhn or Lakatos argues for any such conclusion? Nothing in their writings, to my knowledge, supports (**).

See what I mean? I'm doing all the work for you here, just because your expression of the alleged "problem" is so ill-defined and unargued. Snarkily blaming your interlocutors for "deafening silence" and "vacuous remarks" amounts to mere projection.

leyline

hmm.....

i don't want to get into a sniping match but unknowability can take many forms.

Personally i would say that knowledge necessarily comes from a relationship with reality. Therefore to speak of knowledge outside your own relationship, with anything other than pure imagination, doesn't really make sense. And further even one's imagination is conditioned by one's cultural relationship to reality! ie its a trick question. It tempts us into abstracting knowledge from culture as something 'out there' in the universe. In reality (cultural reality) knowledge is 'in here'.

However we can 'know' in here that our relationships are potentially biased. We do this by applying our cultural techniques to itself. ie by treating our culture as an aspect of reality itself.

Or to put it another way, we can only get the knowledge that our particular relationship with reality creates. It isn't 'out there' passively hanging around in cultural limbo.

Clutch

Leyline, I'm not sure why one would hold such a view. But whatever your reasons for believing this, it does not seem consistent with any sort of unknowability, never mind "many forms" of it.

Any sort of worry about knowability presupposes at least some degree of subject-independent truth or reality. After all, it's not very interesting to hold that we can't know truths or facts beyond our experience because there are no truths or facts beyond our experience. Nor is the worry that we can't know falsehoods, after all! To raise the prospect of unknowability in the first place is to raise the prospect of truths, or a way things are that we cannot know. And this entails "a way things are", independent of our conceiving them that way.

There are nevertheless more and less subjectively-inflected accounts one can give of reality, but these will all be more robust -- or, I would say, less simplistic -- than the idea that "knowledge outside your own relationship... doesn't make sense."

leyline

hi clutch

word of warning i am smokin a jay, but i couldn't resist replying....

"Leyline, I'm not sure why one would hold such a view. But whatever your reasons for believing this, it does not seem consistent with any sort of unknowability, never mind "many forms" of it."

ok let me explain further.

first off though i respect the scientific rationalist materialistic paradigm for knowledge and how it posits the existence of unknown knowledge.


But just as knowledge can only exist in a cultural context with reality, it follows that the unknowable is also in that cultural context. The unknowable requires imagination by definition. What i am saying is that just as a culture is biased in its relationship with reality, and its subsequent interpretation of knowledge. It is also similarly affected by its conception of the unknown.

Thus what science concieves and imagines is unknowable is affected by its method of knowing. It crucially affects how the unknowable is defined and described. For science it imagines the unknowable as existing in spacetime. This includes the future and so many scientists concieve of the future as already existing as in say the block universe models.


but what i believe is that knowledge results from a cultural relationship with reality. Moreover unlike say block universe models of reality not all cultures believe the future exists. If it doesn't exist then there is nowhere for unknown reality and knowlege other than in the present or the past. A prediction is thus not knowledge of the future as science can believe.

So a different paradigm could believe that only the present exists. Whereas science tells us that simultaneity is relative and so the present does not exist. Each thus has a different imagination as to what unknowability is and its context.

this can get very complex as we build up different elements of different cultures and compare their relationship to reality.

exnihilo

Clutch,
Despite what you claim, several people have answered the post quite well. You, on the other hand, seem to think that if everything isn't put in the form of a syllogism that it is indecipherable. Philosophy, yes the name of this board, is not always about logic, but instead about speculation. The problem is simply you cannot think outside the catagories that you keep trying to force the question into. It seems rather obvious that you have no concept of what philosophy entails, as logical induction has never been demonstated to provide tha answer to any of the major questions that philosophy seeks to answer concerning metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics or political/social issues.

The problem I have with your responses are obvious. Your first post was vacuous, as was the response you were lending support to, so don't blame me for pointing it out. And since you have problems understanding sarcasm I will tell you that my comments were directed at you. The responses I point to above reflect the epitome of evasion. One could infer that those who resond in such a manner are probably the selfsame people who adhere to a conception of science that I have criticized. Despite what you say, the tone and content of your responses reveals you to be exactly the type of person I am talking about. I think my position is fairly obvious, and I certainly don't try to hide it behind some structure of scientific methodology; the original question simply asked others what they thought.
Instaed of answering you chose to respond with childish remarks. Is that my fault? I do not believe that science can provide anything but useful approximations and to claim otherwise is misguided and to a certain degree arrogant. You complain that my question doesn't conform to your preconcieved notions
of what an argument ought to be when it is apparent that I do not subscribe to the belief that much a methodology is useful to answer the question I raised. To do so would contravene the basis of the question itself.
I have also noticed that Kuhn is the primary subject of these exchanges when he was simply one person of the many referred to in the original question. I simply put him forth to see what kind of reaction it would evoke, which is pretty much as I expected.
As far as I can tell, no one has addressed the postmodern critique put forth by Derrida and Lyotard, but I have seen Nietzsche mentioned.
Science as it is represented in textbooks conforms exactly to what Derrida has alluded to as a trancendent universal and Lyotard as the master narrative. The problem is that Science is founded upon a methodology that claims objectivity when such objectivity simply does not exist. Defined as such Science is projected into the position of the absent center, while at the same time, though the claims of objectivity and Truth, setting itself outiside of the system that it centers. Forexample, to claim that second and third level (re)representations viewed through the lens of an electron microscope or measured in a bubble chamber is observation is simply subterfuge. Instead it is an example of the procession of the simulacrum. Foucault has also argued that such systems of classification are nothing more than regimes of power that privilige one way of thinking to the detriment of another. Science is privileged--officially sanctioned as truth--while indigenous knowledge is excluded. Understood in this way Science is seen as a self-legitimating system of knoweldge that privileges Western forms of perception over alternate systems such as those of Asia, as well as all indigenous forms of understanding. Thus, the label non-scientific has come to connotate ignorance, superstition and such, despite the fact that people using these so-called "primitive" systems made discoveries in areas such as astronomy, botany, engineering, and chemistry long before the advent of the scientific method. Nonetheless, these systems are characterised as inferior since they do not conform with scientific methods of observation.

--exnihilo

Clutch

I apologize for attempting to force your writings into the narrow categories of cogency and intelligibility. Your last post represents a ne plus ultra of the denial of these repressive notions; I bow to your grasp of "logical induction", and surrender the field accordingly.