At the end of The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin discusses the character of science. What fascinated me is that he picked out (at least in name) two aspects that I’ve proposed here: namely science as an monastic/ethical and imaginative community. Let’s drop in a couple of quotes here and, hopefully, come back and discuss …
Tag Archives: community
Science as imaginative community
[That's imaginative, not imaginary ] I’m trying to get to discussing a view of science-as-hermanteutic, but life is getting in the way of me pulling some thoughts together. So, as a stepping stone, here are some related comments from Kevin Vanhoozer (originally related to theology, but I’m borrowing the ideas!) To see knowledge as a …
How do you decide who’s a crackpot?
For various reasons, I’m facinated by the contraversy of String Theory (mentioned in a couple of recent posts), so I’ll probably continue to refer to it now and again here. For now, here is a quote from Peter Woit that seems worth noting for the discussions here… There are plenty of people out there whose …
Aside on String Theory
In an earlier post I obliquely referred to the books ‘Not Even Wrong’ by Peter Woit and ‘The Trouble with Physics’ by Lee Smolin. These discuss perceived problems with String Theory. Since then there have been news items about a proposed experimental test for ST. I was all ready to post about this to show …
Humility (cont)
Comments on my previous post have provoked some more (rambling) thoughts… The main idea of the post was that science is a community that promotes the intellectual virtue of humility towards nature/creation. Charlie suggested that having humility towards creation should apply generally which it is hard to disagree with. But maybe the point is that …
Humility
A while ago I started to think about science as a community for fostering intellectual virtues. One of the key intellectual virtues is humility. In science I think this works two ways. First, we must have humility towards creation. We cannot simply take our thoughts as correct independent of our experience or experiments. To quote …
relevant questions, acceptable answers
It’s been a busy few months at work, hence the lack of posts, but hopefully I can get back on track again now… I can’t remember why, but the other day I remembered something I read along time ago about Max Weber: One of his ideas/observations is that the process of socialisation defines for people …