[FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Thu Sep 21 15:39:16 EDT 2017

To clarify, I meant `meta-knowledge' in the sense of "Do I know what I know?" or "Do I know I don't know?"  as opposed to the idea of drawing conclusions by studying other studies.  Can one label their questions or propositions as vague or not vague..  

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From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Nick Thompson
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 1:32 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Cc: 'Mike Bybee' <mikebybee at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Glen,

This baffled me as much as it interested me.  In the end, I wasn't sure whose side you were on.  My problem may be that, being a Peircean, philosophy is for me just an extension of the scientific method and philosophical knowledge is just "meta-knowledge" gleaned from the same sources as scientific knowledge.  Speaking as a sort-of ornithologist, I still think the metaphor stinks. It still strikes me as one of those unthinking philosophical platitudes trotted out by people without the knowledge of experience to think philosophically.  Remember that guy Donald Griffin who thought he knew about "mind" because he knew so much about bats and insects? 

Nick 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of g??? ?
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 12:28 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

It's definitely sage.  But the sagacity doesn't hinge on the word "science", it hinges on the word _useful_.  Science is often thought to be a body of knowledge.  But there's a huge swath of people, me included, who think science is not knowledge, but a method/behavior for formulating and testing hypotheses.  It's not clear to me that Feynman actually said this.  But Feynman is a good candidate because he cared far more about what you _do_ than what you claim to _know_.

Philosophy (of anything) can be useful.  But to any working scientist, it is far less useful than, say, glass blowing, programming, or cell sorting.  And if you think distinguishing between the usefulness of beakers from the usefulness of ... oh, let's say Popper's 3 worlds, then your expression says more about you than it does about them.

On 09/20/2017 08:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> By the way, the Feynman quote is really dumb, and it’s annoying that people keep trotting it out as if it was sage.  The reason birds can’t make use of ornithology is they can’t read. Think how useful it would be for a cuckoo host to be able to spend a few hours reading a text on egg identification.   Is the reason physicists can’t make use of philosophy of science that they can’t think?  I doubt anyone who cites this “aphorism” would come to that conclusion.  Bad metaphor. 

--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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