Author: Joe Besogn
Date: 12:24:04 11/06/00
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On November 06, 2000 at 11:32:01, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Yeah, so it is. I knew that vision of how cience evolves. And the reason of the >obstinacy of common scientist is simple: they have invested in his current >conception a full life of studies and learning and even his positions in the >academic world depends on that. So they have not real interest to see the world >in a different way. That's reason why academy tends to means something >conservative, even reactionary. It is interestign to see that almost nothing of >the many inventions and visions developed in the beginning of the industrial >revolution came from universities. And whwen such happens, the man that make the >breaktrought tends to be kind of an outsider. >Fernando this tells us even more, then, why practitioners of different paradigms ‘talk through each other’, argue in circles; not only do they not share the same concepts (Newtonian vs. Einsteinian mass; incompatibility), they may not even share the same criteria of what can count as a good solution to a problem (waves in media vs. waves without media; incommensurability); the key point is that there is no independent third party that can adjudicate such conflicts and differences, because it is the communal assent of a group of practitioners that determines what a paradigm is and which practices will be followed; thus there is no higher mode of explanation, and revolutionaries must resort to persuasion, politics instead of logic; this does not mean that we can agree to just anything; it means our systems of comprehending the world are essentially limited in certain ways; it reflects not a power of the mind but a weakness
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