Re: OT: Re: Do I have to be an expert to get performance: CL versus Perl

On 23 Dec 2005 12:06:38 -0500, jayessay wrote:

> Paul Foley <see@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (http://public.xdi.org/=pf) writes:
>> universe should act in a way describable by mathematics. [Hence it's
>> foolish to define "scientific" to mean merely "falsifiable".

> I don't think anyone claims a necessary and sufficient connection
> here, nor that "falsifiable" is sufficient, only that it is necessary,
> a _much_ weaker claim.

My point was that it's not necessary, either.

>> (there's a redundant phrase for you!) is based on axioms which are
>> clearly true (denial leads to a performative contradiction) and logic
>> to deduce facts about the world which therefore must be true; this is
>> an application of _science_, by any reasonable definition

> Only if you take pure mathematics as "science". Maybe it is, maybe it
> isn't.

Well...axioms of pure mathematics are not necessarily "true" (if that
even has meaning); you can pick different axioms if you want (e.g.,
you can get Euclidean geometry or Lobachevsky/Bolyai/Riemann, etc.).
What you do with your chosen axioms is "science" I suppose. The
utility of the falsifiability criterion in the natural sciences is
that it lets you choose between (consistent sets of) axioms, when
there's no a priori way to decide -- but all the knowledge you derive
from that is uncertain because every step is only "not yet falsified",
which is not the same as "verified"; if you have some way to find out
something which is /true/, that is obviously not falsifiable, but to
exclude it from "science" is just dumb. E.g., the statement that
"anything that is red all over cannot be green all over" is
necessarily true; it would be silly to run out and try to gather
"empirical evidence" and attempt to falsify the proposition.

--
Quid enim est stultius quam incerta pro certis habere, falsa pro veris?
-- Cicero
(setq reply-to
(concatenate 'string "Paul Foley " "<mycroft" '(#\@) "actrix.gen.nz>"))
.

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