Conspiracy Theories

[Stavros]

The art of transliterating a scientific argument into lay terms is always a challenge and almost always critical to getting the lay-public to understand and care about the argument. I do think the basic mechanisms of climatology are easier to convey than the symmetry breaking mechanisms that underlie condensed matter physics. This may be why there is in fact a public discussion of climate change and why the Superconducting Super Collider was never built.

There is politics in science, though it’s rarely the left vs right issues that most people associate with the word “politics.” In any academic department there are factions who fight hard to hire people who research this rather than that. There are of course the politics that accompany the personal jealousies that arise in any organization. The organizations and panels that are responsible each year for gifting awards and grants are pressured by people who think this field is trivial and that field is cutting edge. There is also fraud in science. But Kuhn not withstanding, these flaws rarely delay progress toward honest understanding. Most researchers are fairly quick at recognizing which models are working and which are not, and in a rush to make or maintain their own reputations they will be guided by the ones that work. Progress moves so fast in the 21st century no one can afford to get hung up on ideas that show no promise.

What Popper has right is that falsifiability is an epistemological virtue. If he was attempting to describe how one SHOULD proceed in the aquisition of knowledge, he was on the right track, but dangerously close to the very metaphysics he eschewed (since a “should” claim would be metaphysical). If he was attempting to describe what scientists do when they do science he did leave out the “political” component. What Wittenstein got right is that the correspondence theory of truth is probably too simplistic a model of language. But do we really want to go so far as to claim, as did Wittgenstein, that talk of truth is just a language game.

Fair dues, and all fair points. I should explain that I came to Popper through his two volume study The Open Society and its Enemies, a book dismissive of history and with a chapter on Hegel that is risible for its lack of understanding. It would take too long to go into the limited value of the book, which has not been anywhere near as influential as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and is not really pertinent to this thread.

[hippifried]

Hmmmm... Bilderberger huh? Can I pile on all the cheese I want?