The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [pdf]
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I've found that idea to be very valuable when navigating disagreements at work (and in life generally). Refutation is seldom constructive in isolation - you also need to bring a constructive alternative if you want to keep things moving forward.
I guess that sounds like common sense, but I'm surprised by how often people cleave to exclusively negative argumentation (particularly in political discussions).
Most of the "but there is no good evidence" arguing is not actually arguing in good faith.
AGW isn't much different. People leap on 0.1C differences and say AHA fail without contextualising it and then argue anyone who contextualising is "lying" or "altering the data"
its a bizarre reductionism, based on autodidact understanding of science. "Because I believe this is the scientific method all the other scientists are not scienting and this is not scientific therefore its trash therefore my theory based on lizard people wins"
That's not Kuhn's observation. Evidence immediately overturns a theory. What evidence doesn't do is get the scientific establishment to accept the new evidence. It's why paradigm shifts are rare and take a lot of time to happen. In many instances, society simply has to wait for the old to die and the new to gain power.
> (particularly in political discussions).
That was kuhn's point. Science operates more like politics and religion than science. Many times there is no reason, evidence or argument to change poeple's minds. You have to simply wait for the old guard to die off so that the new guard can usher in a paradigm shift.
It's how einstein went to the grave believing "god does not play dice" regardless of all the evidence. And his death moved physics from the deterministic to the nondeterministic world ( paradigm shift ). For all the praise einstein gets, he was wrong about the most important and fundamental aspect of physics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_S....
These seem like uncontroversial observations.
"What do you read to follow the news?" is an incredibly easy question. Even if she doesn't read any newspaper, she could have just named one. "USA Today" is a pretty safe answer that won't offend anyone. Watching Palin struggle with this basic question was painful.
- "I read the Alaska Daily News" ← Small timer, not ready for national stage
- "I read the New York Times" ← Liberal bias, piss off your base
- "I read USA Today" ← A newspaper for babies
- "I read everything" ← Cop out answer and nobody buys it (which is what she said)
- "I read the Wall Street Journal" ← Actually this would be a really good answer because it's national scale and non-liberal, but it's hard to come up with in the moment
The whole point of the question is "reveal something about yourself" but whatever you reveal has positives and negatives that you need to weigh out beforehand. The point of being in the limelight longer is you can burn all your bad answers earlier before anyone cares about them and figure out your strategy.
Nobody is going to be that offended by what paper you read. I suggested "USA Today" because it's about the blandest paper you can pick, and nobody can really object to it. Your suggestion, the Wall Street Journal, is not at all difficult to come up with in the moment. It's probably the 2nd or 3rd most influential paper in the US.
Instead of just naming a newspaper, she froze like a deer in the headlights. That just confirmed what many people already thought - she probably reads nothing.
Palin doesn't come across as much of a reader, and it would not surprise me at all if she really didn't read the news.
I really don't know about this - the divisions that humans have created in their study of science are pretty artificial, i.e. physics/chemistry/biology, and seem to have more to do with academic politics and funding opportunities than the natural world itself. Nature doesn't care about such divisions, not in the least.
Mathematics is something of a special case, in that its results (and motivations) are as relevant to the world of art as they are to the world of science.
Nevertheless the natural world, the object of scientific study, should remain the focus of attention, and the fundamental approaches - observation, experiment, theoretical construction - haven't really changed at all since the concept was invented.
Like, do you need to know anything about Roman culture to understand Latin grammar? No.
But you do need to be fluent in Roman culture to understand Latin jokes, puns, similes, metaphors, and all the other things that go into meaning.
For a more modern example: Observe how British English can turn almost any noun into an insult in much the same way that this just doesn't work in American. Or how a Californian can say "this is not my favorite" and we all know they mean "this is awful". Or how Australians can use "you c*nts" as a term of endearment, but Americans cannot. Meanwhile Americans can use motherf*cker as both a term of endearment and an insult depending on situation.
And who could forget the subtle difference between "You are shit" and "You are the shit". Where does that show up in grammar?
edit: oh here’s a good one! The phrase “I love you” changes meaning when you say it to family, friends, coworkers, strangers, performers on stage, etc. Some languages even use different words for those meanings, but they all translate to “love” In English.
You absolutely cannot understand the full meaning of language without understanding the speaker’s context.
You need to understand Roman culture to understand Roman jokes, but that is a property of Roman culture, not the Latin language. You could translate American jokes into Latin, and then a hypothetical American who can speak Latin but doesn't know anything about Roman culture would be able to understand and find them funny.
Of course, you can't understand the full meaning of an utterance that someone utters in a particular context without understanding who that person is and what the context is. A Roman who somehow spoke perfectly grammatical English would still probably be hard for us to understand. But that's a property of an utterance, not the language itself.
For example, in the sentence "I think you should do that", with an emphasis on the "you", what is the grammatical role of that emphasis? It's not necessarily something you'll find explicitly in an English textbook, but it is conveying important meaning here. It's also cultural - I will use different forms of emphasis of I'm from the US or from the UK. In the US I might speak louder for emphasis, in the UK I might speak more slowly for emphasis, or use a different word choice.
But what happens if I'm culturally British, in the UK, a native English speaker, but speaking a sign language like BSL? Well then I'm going to use a different form of emphasis again, because BSL has its own ways of indicating emphasis. So clearly emphasis is also related to the language one speaks - my culture hasn't changed, after all!
This is the issue with splitting language to into a cultural part and a linguistic part - too much of language straddles both sides. You might say that the core of a language is its grammar, but Scots English and AAVE are both grammatically different from Standard British English, and yet the differences there are as much cultural as purely linguistic.
In principle, I get what you mean - you can learn all the words and the grammar of a language from a textbook without knowing anything about the culture behind that language. But if you can't use the language to communicate fluently with native speakers of that language, have you really learned it? Your time traveling Roman asking for the portal rather than the door has basically just invented his own dialect, not learned English to any meaningful degree.
A fun argument for how important this is: The only reason we have Middle Earth, Lord of The Rings, etc is because Tolkien needed a world and a history to embed his languages in. Otherwise they couldn’t have any real meaning. He could construct the grammar, yes, but not the semantics.
Even something as simple as what our shortest words encode tells a lot about our culture or history. We use short words for things we say often.
Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi, 1958.
"not only that there is knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated by verbal means, but also that all knowledge is rooted in tacit knowledge...."
Against Method. Paul Feyerabend, 1975.
"there no such thing as the scientific method and we should not impose a single methodological rule upon scientific practices."
He also hung with the economists, it's interesting to read stuff from the early years of the LSE. People get hung up in Hayek but Polyani was hanging out in the same rooms.
Rules here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_...
Extended copyright harms the public domain, but the only realistic solution is for authors or publishers to believe in the common good more than their own profits. That does happen: Wikipedia for example is licensed under CC-BY-SA. But then you have Jimmy Wales pleading for donations regularly. Authors and publishers depend on copyright for well deserved income. In the US the balance of interests has swung so far away from the common good toward the author’s and publisher’s interests that for example interesting parody literature like The Wind Done Gone (a parody of Gone with the Wind having the same characters) are suppressed.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the best books I ever read.