Re: [ontolog-forum] rant on pseudoscience

[Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Avril

there are still strong formalist tendencies going on in philosophy, and I think they are too strong. Logical thinking should indeed be accommodated, but the role of logic is only instrumental.

... but mathematics has come to be identical with philosophy for modern thinkers, thought they say that it should be studied for the sake of other things. Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 1, chapter 9.

and as you note, sometimes the form (malism) becomes more important than the substance, i see this everyday

At worst, the formalist ideology culminates into desperate attempts to 'appear' as 'scientific', by using the language of mathematics and physics, even though that what is said with the language is extremely unimportant.

so true
 

However, given a _scientific_ theory expressed in natural language, it should preferably be such that it is possible or even very easy to formalize it. If a theory is not formalizable by using the very basic tools such as:

-existential and universal quantors
-monadic and dyadic predicates and variables
-logical AND, OR, NOT, ->, brackets
-partOf/subset and memberOf connectives and collections

then I'd suspect that the theory is some sort of continental crap.

define /contextualize 'continental' pls (you mean as in the british sense?)
 

By crap, I don't mean that it is all bad, but that it is written in an uneconomical/continental way, which means that it could have been written in a much clearer and easier way.

woud that not be due to linguistic circumstances
 

With a 2 minute look, it is quite clear that the best part of this could have been written in a lot of shorter and clearer form:

http://avantgardescience.com/images/beginning.pdf

Reading that is like masturbating with a cheese slicer: slightly amusing, but mostly painful.

I would have to design some experiments to confirm that (LOL)


 

One has to do extra work in digging out the 'sense' from that. There are too many loosely (or not at all) defined terms, and when the beginning is loose, how firm can the rest be? Also, the writer seems to dig out mysticism out of QM, when QM is in fact quite simple, at least compared to string theory.

Look forward to a critique




P

-Avril



Lainaus "Paola Di Maio" <paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx>:

One of the reasons why I have been (trying to) hammer on the chinese logic
issues
is because it looks to me that the distinction between the boundary between
science and pseudoscience, is  not always legitimate, often it is arbirtary
and based on the belief system
of the beholder


Too many scientists and researchers today are still refusing to take ito
account interdisciplinary
perspectives and look at the universe as a whole,, and continue to do
research with world view of  amoebas
(which i am sure its valuable too in its own way)


if we want to advance scientific knowledge 'as a whole', we need to stop
dismissing outright what cannot be translated to
FOL as quackery,

 at least stop hiring and putting in charge of multibillion research
programmes people who have
very narrow views of the world

For example, the paper below comes across as possibly 'a bit off the wall'
in scientific terms  (even to me actually)

http://avantgardescience.com/images/beginning.pdf

but from the parts which I managed to read its actually just the result of
mixing scientific paradigms (which are the result of logical inferences)
with
logically nonsensical beliefs and contexts

i just want to say, that the universe cannot be translated to FOL, but maybe
parts of it can, and thats no longer enough
to support the advancing of science,

It must have been a similar transition from the middle ages to the
enlightenment

P








--
Paola Di Maio
**************************************************
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
**************************************************

--
Always forward towards the supreme maxim of scientific philosophizing

-- 
Paola Di Maio
**************************************************
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
**************************************************

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