Author: Joe Besogn
Date: 07:08:56 11/07/00
Go up one level in this thread
On November 07, 2000 at 08:40:09, Fernando Villegas wrote: >You go deeper and deeper in this quest. Well, that reality that seems to be >another kind of paradigm is, it seems to me, kind of a cake with very different >layers. Some of them are the result of our own behaviour and so are capable of >being what we decide they must be. Human-produced reality. But in the bottom -I >will jump over the intermediate cases- we find the "thing in itself" that has >its own being that sooner or later comes out and make his demands. This kind of >layer I would call the final arbiter. We can go this or that technological path >to produce this or that cultural world, but gravity laws are untamable. You are >going to fall anyway. You must take into acccount the fall of bodies. No way. No >cheating with that. >Respect chess, we are here in some intermediate layer where reality is or will >be what we decide it will be. At least to a point. If nobody never think in >doing things differently, chess in itself will not push with crisis. Chess is an >artifact so is a kind of dead thing. We decide how it lives. >Fernando Kuhn wants to abandon the concept of progress ============================================= But the discovery of a new paradigm is not only an improvement. Some problems have to be abandoned in the new paradigm, and some phenomena could be better explained within the old one. One example is the theories of Newton that led to having to accept gravitation as an inexplicable inherent property of matter under a long period, while it earlier had been tried to find mechanical explanations and "inherent properties" where seen as superstitions. This realization leads to Kuhn questioning our whole concept of progress. It is not possible to compare paradigms, according to him. They are so different that argumentation between them is rendered impossible. For example, different phenomena are seen as important to explain, making it impossible to objectively say which one is better. He even goes so far as to say that the adherents of different paradigms live in different worlds. But this view also makes it necessary to question the whole existence of an objective truth, which Kuhn does. He does not believe that science ever will be able to describe truth and compares his theories to Darwin's: the resistance to them stem from them describing a development moving away from something, but without a definite goal, an almost random drifting. ====================================================== Kuhn disagrees with you. He says there is no 'at the bottom', no 'thing-in-itself' that acts as final arbiter. He says the world is large, scientific models are, of necessity, only partial visions of 'reality', each model only explains certain phenomena, each model only looks-at the 'thing' in a restricted way, to look at each-thing in every-way - solving chess is child's play in comparison. Fernando, aren't you guilty of one of the seven deadly sins of the computer chess enthusiast? Reductionism - finding-the-answer - finding the thing-in-itself? Muddling meta with actual: new paradigm says the thing-in-itself does not exist - no one best move - no one solution - no valid answer from win/lose.
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