“Have you heard this line? ‘Now that we know about brain physiology, it’s obvious that there could be no such thing as free will.’ That’s like saying that the circuitry of a cellphone determines the conversations which takes place on it.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” August 26, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/telephones-and-free-will].
“Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: ‘Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.’”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“the scientist who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical ‘fixed’ vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
In my latest Epoch Times column I say instead of worrying about polls asking whether we think the decline in trust might mysteriously reverse itself, we should concentrate on reversing it by making sure we’re trustworthy. I know it sounds weird but it just might work.
“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die
“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
“Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James's phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“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