“I got an invitation from Carleton University’s College of the Humanities and College Anniversary Committee to a 10th anniversary celebration with a lecture from professor Roy Mottahedeh of Harvard on ‘Pluralism in Non-Western Traditions: the Case of Islam’ which added (generically) ‘Your presence will enrich this momentous occasion for us.’ And I thought ‘Sorry, I’m having my leg pulled that night.’”
One of mine, from September 15, 2006
“The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be ‘curved’ – it was not that sort of thing – were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor were the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to develop a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogeneous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter. If it had not been, Newtonian physics would not have worked. To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space-time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion.’ Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad. On the other hand, once they had been made and understood, both Descartes and Huyghens could realize that the earth's motion was a question with no content for science.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“As the psychologists explained, one of the things that makes incompetents incompetent is an inability to recognize the difference between competence and incompetence.”
David Frum in National Post Jan. 22, 2000 [with reference to a study at Cornell finding that those who did worst on a grammar test rated themselves best]
In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore the tidal wave of linguistic sewage engulfing us from social media to the pages of daily papers as evidence of mental and moral decay.
“No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. That remark does not mean that scientists do not reject scientific theories, or that experience and experiment are not essential to the process in which they do so. But it does mean – what will ultimately be a central point – that the act of judgment that leads scientists to object a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. That decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn against chasing trends in fashion, food or public policy.
“remember that neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or item by item. Except when all the conceptual and manipulative categories are prepared in advance – e.g., for the discovery of an additional transuranic element or for catching sight of a new house – both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience. The child who transfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females to his mother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs – indeed comma much of his perceived world – change accordingly.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude – a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know…”
G.K. Chesterton “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois” in The Wisdom of Father Brown https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown-00-h.html