There's another story I vaguely remember (though not the title or author), where a time-traveler tries to jump-start science among the Greeks and they just decide it's too much trouble. Or maybe I am remembering "Aristotle and the Gun."
That's the one that resonates with my experience as a biology teacher. Even in easy-fied virtual experiments like Jon Herron's "Frog Pond," most students get bored and start trying to test a new hypothesis before they have enough data to rule out the first one. I've often said that the scientific personality involves a very weird combination of a low tolerance for authority and a high tolerance for boredom.
Aarrgghh! You've put 2/3rds of my second semester of philosophy into a single post. And I'm so sharing it with my students... after we get to Kant. On second thought, maybe I'll just give them this: "Philosophy is deep. Science only works if it’s shallow." That's why I teach phil and not science.
"Apparently not, at least according to Strevens. Aristotle was plenty rational, and a keen observer of the world. But he was also a philosopher, and accordingly there was a lot of philosophy in his explanations: teleology, aesthetics, common sense, and logic. And why wouldn’t there be? If you’re trying to understand the world, why wouldn’t you bring every field of knowledge and every way of thinking to bear?"
There's a competing (?) take on the development of science that it required an a priori (or perhaps theological, depending on the telling) belief in a rational, ordered, consistent universe, where an observation at one time would have bearing on an observation at another, barring extraordinarily rare miracles. Is this kind of presupposition or meta belief consistent with the approach that everything other than empirical observation must be shunted firmly aside?
Yeah, I've come across that take (maybe something Charles Taylor said?) I guess my initial take is that there is an axis related to "consistent universe" but it works best when it's in the middle. You believe experimental results are replicable, but you're not looking for some overarching model like a magic system in a fantasy novel.
I thought of that as I wrote it, but the current best guess of the overarching model for everything is so weird that no ancient philosopher would ever have arrived at it...
"Richard Feynman once opined that physics should not be taught in high school because high school teachers screwed it up so badly that kids only learned to hate physics instead of seeing its beauty."
What subjects remain if we generalize this, though?
I’m not sure why it should be “irrational” to impose restrictions on your inquiry. Compartmentalization of inquiry from emotion seems to be at the very heart of rationality.
In it the authors make this interesting comment that a complete theory has a component (ie variable) for every real thing, and no others. Science is the process of making a model and checking if it’s “real”—whether changing the inputs correctly predicts an observed output.
I think that Strevens is arguing that they're not dispensing with emotion they're dispensing with world building—the idea that the world should make sense. Which is arguably rational, but needs to be dispensed with.
It does sound like the paper is right down the line of what Strevens is proposing. Reality is uncovered through empirical observation, and only that.
At a coarse view, the industrial revolution is very visible. But if that is the only thing you can see, you have n=1 and how can you conclude anything from that? If you can rule Galileo in or out, then you must have much more specific beliefs about the history of science.
I do have much more specific beliefs about the history of science. You mention some things which seem to contradict them. Before we even get to the speed of progression, can we agree on the sign? It appears to me that Rome caused a regression in science and technology for about a thousand years starting in 150BC. Not just a shock cutting off the heights, but continuing decline, every century having lower heights than before (with maybe a bit of progress 50-150). But at the same time, raising up the lowest levels by spreading eastern knowledge to the west, raising up Britain and maybe France and Spain. The question is not why did Rome fail to make dramatic progress, but why did it destroy its inheritance? I am less familiar with the Islamic Golden Age, but I have heard the claim that was also a period of regress. The easiest exercise is to identify the figures famous enough to have Latinized names and compare them. Averroes (1126-1198) seems a regression from Avicenna (980-1037). But fame isn't everything; eg, Avicenna's correspondent al-Biruni seems better.
It appears to me that the big event was in the Hellenistic era. Everyone talks about Aristotle as the height of Greek physics, the benchmark that Avicenna studies and Galileo fights with, but he was the beginning of the era, not the end. Simply looking at the dates of Greek figures rewrote my understanding of the history of science. Ignorance of Archimedes is a measure of regression. (I googled Islamic commentary on Archimedes and got Al-Kindi (801-873), earlier than the famous people who wrote about Aristotle.) I think the 150 years 300-150 made more scientific progress than, 1550-1700. Maybe 1600-1750. And these are directly comparable because they were rediscovering things known to the ancients.
I also want to mention the Renaissance of the 12th century, set off by Latin translations of Islamic work. It appears to me that by the time the Black Death hit, the rising West had overtaken the falling East (in science, not technology). One random step in this process was that Aquinas sent William of Moerbeke to Greece to find Aristotle and he brought back Archimedes. But Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon had gotten the ball rolling without much Archimedes.
Science fiction has played with this idea repeatedly.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/97011/time-travel-short-story-trying-to-give-ancient-greeks-a-head-start-in-science
There's another story I vaguely remember (though not the title or author), where a time-traveler tries to jump-start science among the Greeks and they just decide it's too much trouble. Or maybe I am remembering "Aristotle and the Gun."
That's the one that resonates with my experience as a biology teacher. Even in easy-fied virtual experiments like Jon Herron's "Frog Pond," most students get bored and start trying to test a new hypothesis before they have enough data to rule out the first one. I've often said that the scientific personality involves a very weird combination of a low tolerance for authority and a high tolerance for boredom.
Aarrgghh! You've put 2/3rds of my second semester of philosophy into a single post. And I'm so sharing it with my students... after we get to Kant. On second thought, maybe I'll just give them this: "Philosophy is deep. Science only works if it’s shallow." That's why I teach phil and not science.
I appreciate both your frustration and your kind words. And I understand the appeal of depth.
Possibly I'm leaving this comment too soon, but:
"Apparently not, at least according to Strevens. Aristotle was plenty rational, and a keen observer of the world. But he was also a philosopher, and accordingly there was a lot of philosophy in his explanations: teleology, aesthetics, common sense, and logic. And why wouldn’t there be? If you’re trying to understand the world, why wouldn’t you bring every field of knowledge and every way of thinking to bear?"
There's a competing (?) take on the development of science that it required an a priori (or perhaps theological, depending on the telling) belief in a rational, ordered, consistent universe, where an observation at one time would have bearing on an observation at another, barring extraordinarily rare miracles. Is this kind of presupposition or meta belief consistent with the approach that everything other than empirical observation must be shunted firmly aside?
Yeah, I've come across that take (maybe something Charles Taylor said?) I guess my initial take is that there is an axis related to "consistent universe" but it works best when it's in the middle. You believe experimental results are replicable, but you're not looking for some overarching model like a magic system in a fantasy novel.
"some overarching model"
aka the holy grail of physics? ;)
I thought of that as I wrote it, but the current best guess of the overarching model for everything is so weird that no ancient philosopher would ever have arrived at it...
https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o?is=LJqQjZZAYokfDnen
"Richard Feynman once opined that physics should not be taught in high school because high school teachers screwed it up so badly that kids only learned to hate physics instead of seeing its beauty."
What subjects remain if we generalize this, though?
Physics at least is optional.
Does it generalize? Is it possible that certain subjects are easier to screw up than others?
I’m not sure why it should be “irrational” to impose restrictions on your inquiry. Compartmentalization of inquiry from emotion seems to be at the very heart of rationality.
Related, I recently listened to a cool review of the EPR paper (https://youtu.be/D6zJR5d2bs0?is=L3FBowXIeWi4iAzf)
In it the authors make this interesting comment that a complete theory has a component (ie variable) for every real thing, and no others. Science is the process of making a model and checking if it’s “real”—whether changing the inputs correctly predicts an observed output.
I think that Strevens is arguing that they're not dispensing with emotion they're dispensing with world building—the idea that the world should make sense. Which is arguably rational, but needs to be dispensed with.
It does sound like the paper is right down the line of what Strevens is proposing. Reality is uncovered through empirical observation, and only that.
At a coarse view, the industrial revolution is very visible. But if that is the only thing you can see, you have n=1 and how can you conclude anything from that? If you can rule Galileo in or out, then you must have much more specific beliefs about the history of science.
I do have much more specific beliefs about the history of science. You mention some things which seem to contradict them. Before we even get to the speed of progression, can we agree on the sign? It appears to me that Rome caused a regression in science and technology for about a thousand years starting in 150BC. Not just a shock cutting off the heights, but continuing decline, every century having lower heights than before (with maybe a bit of progress 50-150). But at the same time, raising up the lowest levels by spreading eastern knowledge to the west, raising up Britain and maybe France and Spain. The question is not why did Rome fail to make dramatic progress, but why did it destroy its inheritance? I am less familiar with the Islamic Golden Age, but I have heard the claim that was also a period of regress. The easiest exercise is to identify the figures famous enough to have Latinized names and compare them. Averroes (1126-1198) seems a regression from Avicenna (980-1037). But fame isn't everything; eg, Avicenna's correspondent al-Biruni seems better.
It appears to me that the big event was in the Hellenistic era. Everyone talks about Aristotle as the height of Greek physics, the benchmark that Avicenna studies and Galileo fights with, but he was the beginning of the era, not the end. Simply looking at the dates of Greek figures rewrote my understanding of the history of science. Ignorance of Archimedes is a measure of regression. (I googled Islamic commentary on Archimedes and got Al-Kindi (801-873), earlier than the famous people who wrote about Aristotle.) I think the 150 years 300-150 made more scientific progress than, 1550-1700. Maybe 1600-1750. And these are directly comparable because they were rediscovering things known to the ancients.
I also want to mention the Renaissance of the 12th century, set off by Latin translations of Islamic work. It appears to me that by the time the Black Death hit, the rising West had overtaken the falling East (in science, not technology). One random step in this process was that Aquinas sent William of Moerbeke to Greece to find Aristotle and he brought back Archimedes. But Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon had gotten the ball rolling without much Archimedes.
Your review reminded me af Sabine Hossenfelders account of the current state of particle physics