beausoleil

**
This really doesn't touch the central issue here-the issue of the descriptive accuracy of what scientists produce when 'theorizing'. To put it another way, it is not what scientists say when they are 'doing science' that is the problem; It is what they say (sometimes) about what they produce when they are doing science that is the problem. Given the epistemic nature of the scientific enterprise, it might very well be that the evolutionary story is the story on which scientists should focus at this time. However, the fact that it is acceptable science does not mean that it is acceptable history.

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I see no problem. Let's focus on the use of the word 'fact' when applied to events in the past (looking at one of your earlier posts). I suggest that the same sort of argument you are making can be applied to any historical fact.

For example, I suggest that aliens visited the Earth in 1860 and rearranged everything to look as if there had been a Napoleonic war. No amount of evidence that there was a Napoleonic War can count against this theory. Nonetheless, we would still say that the Napoleonic War was a fact.

But perhaps you can refine your argument in such a way that there are some things in history that can be described as facts, and others that can't. Why not have a go?

John Galt, Jr.

I am splitting my response to Vorkosigan into two parts.

Vorkosigan

I said
You said I am not interested in defending the position that Plantinga defends in the paper I linked to an earlier post. I’ll probably say this again.

With respect to my hypotheses, what you are saying above is either so obviously false it is, to use your expression, dumb!, or you are making my point for me. Both the hypothesis as I first presented it (The various species that have existed on Earth have been generated by acts of special creation by non-human intelligence) and the modified version (the various species that we have discovered have been placed here by non-human visitors over the course of the Earth's history) are testable, in principle. They are as testable as any hypothesis about some aspect of the history of this planet. It is true, of course, that the two hypotheses that I have proposed are subject to the same contraints that any other hypotheses about history are subject to-- if we don’t have access to the data that would confirm or disconfirm we can’t decide one way or the other.

The ‘physical evidence’, the ‘bones and stones’, that remain from, say, the Civil war in the US, in themselves, provide comparatively little about the war. The documentation, newspapers, letters, diaries, memories passed on by word of mouth, etc., provide us with a good deal of information, and the ‘bones and stones’ and the documentation, taken together provide us with a great deal of information and the possibility of learning more and more. However, there is much that is simply not known, and may never be known-- how many times during the war, if any, did General Sherman get laid, for example. Perhaps we will never know. An examination of such ‘bones’ as there are certainly won’t tell us. But ‘seven times’ is hardly a meaningless hypothesis, the question that asks how many times is ardly meaningless.

It may very well be true that the hypotheses that I have proposed is one that is useless for contemporary science to pursue. But that does not change the limitation that the inability to show that they are not so puts on what science produces pursuing other more ‘fruitful’ hypotheses.

I said You said It was introduced solely to display another presentation of the point about the ambiguity of the fossil record, as I said in the post to which your responded. In fact you quoted the response/reason.
I said You said ‘Natural selection and genetic change are similarly supported unambiguously by observations of selection processes and genetic change in the lab and in the field’ ‘They can also be seen in the fossil record’ If all this means that one can interpret the fossil record in this way, we have no disagreement. If it means that the fossil record is interpretable only in this way, it is, to once again borrow your adjective, a DUMB claim. Moreover, it is a claim that several of the ‘evolutionists who have posted above have acknowledged.


I said You said I don’t understand what point (you think) you are making here. The only sense in which Hempel argued ‘against’ the idea of a crucial test (a test that will ‘refute one of the hypotheses and support the other’) is his contention that ‘even the most careful and extensive test can neither disprove one of two hypotheses nor prove the other’ to which he adds, ‘thus strictly construed, a crucial experiment is impossible in science’. But an absence of crucial tests in this sense supports my (implicit) general contention that there is no empirical evidence that supports the evolution story over the alternative story that I have proposed; it ceratinly doesn’t help the point that you seem to be making-- that the fossil record is unamibiguous. [These quotes are from Philosophy of Natural Science. I have glanced through my copy of Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science to find something that might imbue your remarks with something significant, but I can find nothing. I don’t find any 1951 paper collected therein. A footnote to the essay ‘Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes’ states that it draws on a 1951 article, but there is nothing in this essay that provides any of your remarks (to the extent that I can understand them) with any help. ]

continued in the next post

John Galt, Jr.

John Galt, Jr.

Vorkosigan,

You said I know all of this, but mentioning it here in the general way that you do makes no point. Once again, this sense in which there are no crucial tests doesn’t help your claim that the fossil record unambiguously shows that your story rather than mine is the correct one. Auxiliary hypotheses, as this notion is described by Hempel, serve to connect proposed hyotheses with test implications (in some cases) allowing the hypothesis that has been proposed to be confirmed or disconfirmed (with appropriate qualifications on the inevitably ‘tentativeness’ of such confirmation or disconfirmation). But again, this provides nothing at all that will support your claim that the fossil record is unambiguous, if that is what it is supposed to do.


You said Again, all of this is irrelevant to anything that I have said. You are spending time making points against theses, views, etc., that I don’t hold and have not tried to support. If this discussion should continue how about if you stop wasting your time talking to me about what is wrong with Plantinga, and I will stop wasting my time and yours repeating that I am not defending Plantigna’s view and that I am not defending creationsim.

You said Once again the remarks about ‘young-earth creationism’ have no bearing on anything that I have said.

Your remark here, ‘the entire idea of “crucial test” is erroneous’ is either merely badly put, or it indicates an incredible lack of understanding of Hempel’s presentation of the notion and an even more signficant lack of understanding of the epistemics of confirmation.

You said Unless I misunderstand you here, your comment about my ‘error’ is silly and nothing but a cheap shot. It is clear from my remarks that it is the ‘support for one hypothesis over another’ that I am asking for, whether this support is in the form of information gathered via experimental testing, or from data-gathering in the field, or anything else that will support the consequences of one story over consequences of the other.

As far as I can see there is a lot of allusions to points made by various philosophers of science, along with some paraphrasing of some of the discussions that are to be found in their work. But it also looks like your understanding of what is being said is wanting to a significant degree.

I’ll close by pointing out that all that I have maintained throughout this entire thread is acknowledged (implicitly) in a recent essay in Scientific American when the author says Scientific American, 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

John Galt, Jr.

[ July 26, 2002: Message edited by: John Galt, Jr. ]</p>