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BGonline.org Forums
OT: Who's your chemical daddy?
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: OT: Who's your chemical daddy? (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Sunday, 15 June 2008, at 1:02 p.m.
When I spoke about a culture using only science, I certainly did not mean that the one that invented the bronze foundry did not use science! Of course they did; without it they would never have come up with the idea in the first place. My point is that they also went well beyond it, blending it with other disciplines including, no doubt, great rhetorical skill to convince the rich and powerful players of their era to permit, promote and fund the project.
Today corn ethanol production in the US, combined with a heavy tariff on Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol to prop it up, is an example of this process gone wrong. And before I say anything about the Laffer Curve, let me know if you consider economics a science. (Here in the US it is sometimes called the "Dismal Science", which as you say doesn't make it science. Nor does it make it dismal, for that matter.)
It's not clear from what you say here where you place philosophy. I read the stuff occasionally and actually like Camus, but have the typical engineer's contempt for it. I don't buy much stock in what any of them say, including Camus, though I have found all of his work brings up and develops discussion around interesting questions. Philosophy can contribute to the marketplace of ideas regarding the human and societal consequences of the adoption of particular new ideas and beliefs, including scientific "truths", though I think good fiction does this far better. Including Camus' fiction, of course.
What you said about trying to fit reality to "inerrant beliefs" is exactly what I said about Lysenko's work, and in fact doing that is now called Lysenkoism. Scientists can be guilty of it on a smaller scale when their work is corrupted by the financial interests of the source of their paycheck, an example being how long the tobacco companies were able to hold out against the tidal wave of evidence that their products kill off part of their customer base every year. I'm the first to agree that correlation isn't causation, but what was the counterargument regarding smoking's overwhelming correlation with lung cancer?
Regarding some "questions of fact", we have no evidence, or insufficient evidence, pro or con. In those cases we have to go with reasonable suppositions, and rational people can differ markedly. That's fine as long as when more evidence becomes available, everyone is willing to admit it into the discussion. When such evidence is presented, it should also be done in a respectful manner and permit other voices to be heard, rather than immediately asserted to be QED. It also helps if we are willing to respect others' right to hold beliefs we don't share, even if in our view they aren't rational.
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