[FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

 

 

Frank and I have a long-running, somewhat facetious, argument about the meaning of probability statements.  We are friends, and we enjoy making each other squirm, a bit.  I talk to him in a way I would not talk to you.  My argument with Frank is light-hearted and you may justifiably be impatient with it. So, some caution, here, therefore. 

 

One of the things Frank and I argue about is, Who exactly gets to say what I believe.  He credits first person accounts, perhaps unconditionally;  I credit third person accounts, conditionally.  Something like that.  So that is a part of what is going on, here.  There is another thread lurking here that concerns what logic, in the ordinary sense, is good for.  Put them together, and you get something like, "I don't care what you think you have deduced from formal logic, if you jump when the empty gun is cocked, you believe that the gun is loaded."  I am looking forward to Frank’s disagreement with that notion.  It's a bit like the distinction between signs and symptoms in medicine.  

 

I certainly don’t want to be an idealist.  I am trying to be an experience-monist:  everything else, ideas, matter, is irreducibly just patterns in experience.  But given the doctrine above, you have a lot to say about whether I am, in fact, an idealist.  Evidence?  

 

I stipulate that I have not answered your longer email of a week ago on this thread.  Given your assertion that I don't read [carefully] what you write, I am taking time to answer it.   Relatives in house, so that process is slow.  

 

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 u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2018 6:30 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

 

So, to be clear, are you also making fun of reasoning like this?  I ask because it's equal in idealism to the trolley problem.

 

On 07/11/2018 07:48 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Jones is in a gunfight

> Jones Knows that his opponent has only a six shooter Jones knows that 

> his opponent has just fired six shots Jones’s opponent aims his gun at 

> Jones Jones reasons that his opponent’s gun is empty Yet he is afraid 

> of being shot.

> Does Jones believe that the gun is empty?

> 

> By the way, given the facts stipulated, you, as a mathematician, would 

> say that the probability that the gun is empty is 1.0, right?

 

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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