Posts Tagged knowledge

When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong

Posted by Daniel Horne in Web Detritus on January 14, 2011

Far SideA research physicist friend of mine who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a bit of a global warming skeptic. When I brought up all the scientific research on the subject, he said, somewhat dismissively, “Yes, but anyone who gets a PhD in climate science goes into it with an agenda. No one goes into particle physics just to prove a point. So no, I don’t always trust their research.” Not being a scientist myself, I had no clever rejoinder at the time, other than to say, essentially, “Well, 50,000 climate scientists can’t all be wrong!” But what if most scientists tend to be wrong most of the time? And not due to political agendas, but academic, professional, or even psychological ones?

A good New Yorker article appeared last month regarding the fallibility of scientific research as currently practiced, or perhaps as inevitably practiced. There is a lot to chew on here, once you consider the ramifications.

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Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on April 20, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:17:56 — 126.3MB)

Discussing the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge.

We’re returning to Plato for a somewhat more thorough treatment than we gave him in Episode 1. This should be considered part two (Hume being #1) of three discussions intended to convey the main conflict in the history of epistemology between the empiricists (like Hume) and the rationalists (like Plato).

We slog through most of the Theaetetus, where Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. Seth is crushed. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe), like anything worth knowing can’t be learned but only elicited out of the depths of your unconscious.

Read along: The Theaetetus and The Meno, or if you don’t like the funky background on those pages, look them up via Project Gutenberg. You could also purchase

Seth did this diagram to express his love of the Meno.

End song: “Obvious Boy” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Listen to the whole album online.

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Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 29, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:25 — 114.9MB)

Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.

We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth’s experience of Towlie, and more.

Read with us: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662.

End song: “Twitch” by by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.

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