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Re: [Phys-l] Postmodernism (Was: From another list)

Sorry, John. It seems you are not up-to-date.

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, John Clement wrote:

It has some reasonable ideas.

There are certainly many truths in science in the sense that there are many
different ways of looking at events and at arriving at a conclusion
consonant with events.
I agree that there are many consistent truths. It is easy to provide an infinity of examples.

We are certainly not engaged in searching for truth, but rather for ways of
describing what we observe so as to form a consistent coherent description
which can predict future experiments correctly.
Currently we call this the process of formulating models.
And remember that
observation is trained, so sometimes what one person observes is not what
another might observe.
I have no idea what this statement means. Inconsistent observations are taken as indications of errors in any context that I know (and I receive Nature magazine weekly).

Passion and conviction does count,
I have no idea what this refers to.

but we do use rules to temper it. We do
use interpretation and sometimes it is only because we agree on it. A good
example is QM where at Copenhagen they voted
No, there was no vote. There was a series of lectures by Neils
Bohr, published as <Atomic Theory and the Descriptiion of Nature>

on the interpretation. Bohm
switched sides and came up with a good counter interpretation and theory
which to my knowledge has never been refuted.

Long laid to rest by John Bell and the generation of experiments that decisively excluded Boehm-type theories. I suspect that Wikipedia has an entry for Bell's Theorem.


So interpretation is what the
majority says it is. In other words we do work by concensus.

Note that "concensus" does not mean majority vote. And, always, experiment is the ultimate decision maker.

So some postmodernists have carried the pendulum all the way to the other
side. They have rejected absolute truth without acknowledging that there
are things that are "true" by a more reasonable standard. Scientific
"truth" is always provisional.

The one thing that almost certainly is "true" is the first line. People
often really do think that way. But the opposite conviction that all truth
is absolute is even more prevalent in our society. Witness the
anti-evolution tirades (they are not debates). Science, math, and history
are taught in an absolutist manner in most of our pre-college schools.
Students have discovered that many so called "facts" are not true, so many
of them swing to the other point of view.

I don't know what meaning to ascribe to these vague generalities. "Truth" is not a relative term in my lexicon. Nor do I , or most of my colleagues, teach physics "in an absolutist manner" (although many of our pre-meds would find the courses easier if we did) so. We teach principles that can be verified by experiment, and we place the students in laboratories where they can perform the experiments - sometimes with surprizing results (in recent years one student found that Isaac Newton had faked a measurement in an acoustics experiment)


So let us take the ying with the yang and consider that there is some
"truth" in the post-modernist tirade.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX
So let us keep our critical faculties on the alert and not open our minds to point where our brains fall out.
Regards,
Jack



ABOUT FROM POSTMODERNISM -- FROM ANOTHER LIST.

Today's fashionable intellectualism goes like this:

There is not truth, or there are many truths.
There is no objectivity, or there are many objectivities called
subjectivities.
Reason which pretends to produce truth does not exist.
Scientists who pretend to use reason to produce truth are pretenders.
What is left is passion. Passionate people do not pretend.
It is being passionate that really counts because there is no truth, no
objecitivity, and no scientific method.
So those who are most passionate are most right.
Those who yell the loudest are the most passionate.
So those who yell and scream and are most obnoxious and insulting are
right, even if there is no right or wrong.
Those who yell and scream and are most passionate have the
deeeeeeeepest truths even if there is no truth.

That is pure nonsense, I think.
Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.
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Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
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_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/mailman/listinfo/phys-l


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