Pierre-Normand

The belief in the power of the King's touch would be one the the things this culture is wrong about. It may even be the case that the widespread wrong...

What is it that I presupposed?

I was discussing Weinberg's arguments regarding reductionism and "arrows of explanation". I didn't make any claim regarding the comparative merits of ...

OK, I see what you mean. My suggestion (or acknowledgement) that primitive (i.e. pre-scientific) societies rely on non-naturalistic explanations was a...

My claims was and remains that the King's Trouch is a distraction. The issue of the King's Touch was raised by Weinberg because he believes faith in p...

You can leave the King's touch out of it. Superstition is rampant in both primitive and technologically advanced societies. What is at issue is the re...

Of course you can say it, truly. Grounds for functional behaviors of human artifacts, or grounds of human cognitive/social phenomena aren't any less p...

That's certainly true. Naturalistic explanation just is one mode of explanation among many others. It does disclose specific empirical domains that ar...

I meant molecular (or chemical) bonds. I've no idea how "nuclear" slipped though my fingers.

This may be because we like to disclose order in nature, and disclosing pockets of order often affords opportunities for prediction and control within...

Weinberg would seem to need to assume that there is just one unique point of convergence to all his "arrows of explanation" lest there be more than on...

I already responded to this. It is the lack of confidence that there might be a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) explanation of the healing power ...

This is a move he commonly makes, as your later chicken soup reference also illustrates. For instances, in Dreams of a Final Theory (p.62) he argues: ...

The dismissal of the alleged healing power of the King's Touch is premised on the lack of a plausible naturalistic explanation (including the placebo ...

For him merely to be making "actual references" to other sciences hardly contradicts my claim that he believes then all to be less "fundamental" than ...

I've finished reading/re-reading Weinberg's two book chapters on reductionism a couple days ago. I also read one of Ernst Mayr's book chapter (Analysi...

One crucial non-reductionist (or pluralist) point that is often overlooked is that both bottom-up material/analytical explanations and top-down formal...

Indeed. That's because the ascription of properties such as pressure and temperature to macroscopic systems composed of many molecules can only be per...

DNA replication is one thing, genetic inheritance is another. The inheritance at issue is inheritance of function. Biological function only can be exp...

That's not an explanation of what a gene is and/or of what genes do. Likewise, listing the components of a computer and specifying the way they are so...

It looks pretty bad for Searle. He has been arrested and put in solitary confinement. His lawyer complained that she's only been allowed to communicat...

Yes, that makes sense. Sorry for misconstruing what you had said. One can indeed act for a reason and one's acting for this reason not constituting on...

It seems self-contradictory, though. You can't divorce reason from moral goodness. Non-rational animals can't behave well or badly in a moral sense si...

That is useful to know!

The case of Gorgias is difficult to decide for we may never know whether his claim that Empedocle had ordered his office in Leontini to be "eavesdropp...

Anders Weinstein who introduced me to philosophy 17 years ago (on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup) was constantly reminding me of this through...

What if your goal precisely is to assert power? Might that not be worthwhile? It need not be nefarious either. One may want to defend ideas in order t...

I am unsure how to interpret this other than meaning that for some questions truth can lay in the middle (i.e. be ill defined, or nuanced) but for som...

In that case we are in agreement. (And I agree with all the rest of your post too.) But then your earlier claim that "a murder spree is a murder spree...

OK, so you are walking back your claim that the truth of string theory can't be in the middle, and that either the theory works or it doesn't. It coul...

Sure, but you can also fill up the details of the case such that it isn't so clear cut. Imagine this to occur on the brink of liberation, or with low ...

In order to defend this claim you provided paradigmatic examples of clear cut cases, or examples where our suspension of judgment is naturally lifted ...

But you do have a position on string theory??

Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later.

You are the one who dropped Weinberg's name and endorsed his views on reductionism as authoritative (without providing specific references).

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, which is directly relevan...

"Mature scientists" seldom are mature philosophers and they engage in as much pseudo-philosophy as any other intellectuals (including philosophers) do...

I know, which is why I brought it up, and also because of Rorty's portrait in your avatar. I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's o...

Might it not sometimes be a moral decision? What if the killings occur in the context of war? The assassination of Nazi officers in occupied France by...

What about Newtonian mechanics? It works fairly well with billiard balls and planets, not so much with heat, light and electrons. It has a restricted ...

I had assumed the OP in this thread was a human being rather than a shadow. I was a big fan of Steven Weinberg when I was a student in mathematical ph...

Did you not notice the topic of this thread, the content of the original post, or the arguments advanced by the original poster? It would seem that my...

I singled out Bohr and Heisenberg as beacons of light. They were vanguard of a philosophical revolution that is quite antithetical to the "shut up and...

Scientists are people too, they tend not to notice what you and I now seem to be agreed on, and indeed to angrily take exception to what you now claim...

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an a...

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. Yet, it is the most common thing to be denied by typical critics of "post-modernism".

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." History of science show this to...

It has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and this list has 850 items currently! Thanks for remembering me of it. I may move this title nearer t...

You're welcome. Since the OUP link for Wiggin's book now seems dead (at least on my end) here is another one: Needs, Value, Truth.

Absolutism (dogmatic metaphysics, as Kant would call it, metaphysical realism, as Putnam would call it) ignores the constitutive role of human concept...