Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: What is understanding?



After posting the message I went back to my old site
and noticed that contributions were from two threads.
Here is one fragment, perhaps a good place to begin
a debate.
Ludwik Kowalski

You seem to understand that usefulness is enough. Why muddy
the water with inappropriate and emotion laden words like "truth"?
Of course, in order to be useful our theories must make accurate
(enough) quantitative predictions, but that doesn't make them "true."

To "do" science, we must, I think, believe in the *existence* of an
objective reality, but there is no reason to think that we can ever know
its "true nature" and no difficulty that arises as a result as long as we
do not confuse ourselves and our students by using inappropriate
words like "truth" and "proof" in connection with our models.
My students quickly learn that writing such things in their lab report
summaries tends to produce lots of green ink (my substitute for red)
on their papers.