I caught this quote from Republican presidential candidate and evolution denier Mike Huckabee.
A reporter asked Huckabee how he thought his views — including his view on evolution — might play in the general election.
“Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do,” he said. “In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.“
He’s actually hit upon the very reason why science rules and religion drools.
Yes, our scientific understanding changes. The ideas we hold as true will in 100 years’ time be superceded by better and more refined knowledge. But that’s a good thing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Science is good at changing and updating our canon of knowledge as the facts demand it. That’s why our scientific knowledge has increased exponentially, while religions… look pretty much the same as they did hundreds of years ago.
Because religions are based on beliefs instead of facts, they’re not very good at updating when new facts come in. It takes a long time for religions to change, and there’s usually a lot of resistance. To some, this looks like constancy in a world of change, but it’s actually a drag on human knowledge.
And take a look at the direction of flow. Science is considered good if it’s new and current, while there’s a very strong tendency for some Christian churches to be as ‘first-century’ as possible.
I went to an observatory with the boys the other night. I found out how we know how far away the stars are. I heard about what’s likely to happen to our Sun in the future. Best of all, I got to see clusters of nebulae. There’s so much to learn about our universe, and the scientific method is the most successful way to do that. But for people like Huckabee, if this knowledge doesn’t agree with their biblical preconceptions, they’ll stick with a cosmology made up by people who didn’t have telescopes.
24 October 2007 at 9:13 pm
Amen brother! (only slight sarcasm. once again tone, not substance) But someone needs to point out the inherent problem of approaching science dogmatically and with the fervor of the devout.
25 October 2007 at 12:07 am
[puts hand up] I think I already did that.
25 October 2007 at 3:36 pm
Yes, but we aren’t theists. Science stands on its own, not sure it needs force. Also, I have to point out that you’ve also allowed yourself to get sucked into the Us Vs. Them paradigm.
Now having said that I know there are a lot of idiots out there (some of whom are presidential candidates) that need, lets say, some more education on what science is and how it works but I still contend that that can be accomplished without acting like them.
25 October 2007 at 3:38 pm
Repasting comment since jeffrey commented on it. It should be comment three.
Both of you have done this over and over again.
Dogmatic? Isn’t that exactly the kind of crap that theists hang all over atheists? You can’t be a forceful advocate for atheism (or apparently science) without being called militant or dogmatic or fundamentalist.
I understand your point, and dogmatism isn’t good. But people usually use this to shut us up.
25 October 2007 at 3:43 pm
Forgive my irkage, but it surprised me that you were using the language of people who are the most critical of people like you and me.
And yes, there is a place for forceful advocacy. Ideas don’t promote themselves.
25 October 2007 at 10:13 pm
I can name lots of very strong advocates of science that have never come across like that. I also find it kinda funny because I’m kinda pullin your chain a bit and you are getting irked. Also not a good sign.
And the great ideas do promote themselves because they work.
27 October 2007 at 5:25 pm
Daniel I really like your blog and I certainly have no interest in shutting you up so I’m sorry if you think that’s somehow my intention.
28 October 2007 at 2:09 pm
No, I don’t think that’s what you intended. The point about not being dogmatic was an okay point. Dogmatism is not good. I’m certainly not arguing for being dogmatic.
My question is, where did that even come from? Why did it need saying? Over and over again? I wrote a well-reasoned (I thought) post about how science and religion work. And here comes this ‘dogma’ warning yet again.
You know what? I don’t care if people say I’m dogmatic about science. People are always going to say that, just like they say that about atheists, no matter how well-reasoned they are.
Here, try this. Google dogmatic darwinism. Notice anything about the top returns? They’re almost all creationists. They’re the ones who make the ‘dogmatic’ argument.
jeffrey and snowqueen: your warning was well-intentioned. I shall try to remember it. But toning it down is only one approach. We also need people who are going to turn it up. And right now that’s me. Rock!
28 October 2007 at 3:59 pm
udzdI guess my caution comes from my sense that you are unwilling to consider that even science is not above critique. That doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ or ‘not true’ but that it doesn’t exist outside of human existence within a life conditioned by history, culture and politics. Science is no more neutral than religion although it is undoubtedly more useful nowadays.
My concern is with intellectual freedom and I see you as having exchanged one system claiming ultimate truth for another. The kind of certainty that fundamentalist religious people seek seems to be what you seek in science. This isn’t a path of freedom, but another comfort blanket.
The positioning of science v religion in your posts is not so different in flavour to the positioning of good v evil in the creationist’s. I wonder whether your world is really so black and white? You seem to want to substitute one kind of determinism for another.
That’s the source of my comments, not a criticism of what you wrote which is coherent as ever.
29 October 2007 at 6:57 am
Good and true my friend. Rock on and Rock hard..Not trying to silence a voice of reason, just wanting to make sure you aren’t trading out one set of “certainties” for another. Living in the flux of chaos can be scary but fun so do let yourself try it.
29 October 2007 at 6:59 am
and as always I now see that SnowQueen beat me to the point and expressed it much better..
29 October 2007 at 7:13 am
I think some commenters have really misunderstood my stand here. To say that I’m clinging to science for comfort and certainty? Ridiculous! Science offers neither.
Try this sometime: stand up in front of an audience full of scientists, and try giving a paper where you don’t have all your facts straight. Not very comforting! Eviscerating more like. All part of the method though.
And certainty? When everything we know will be changed over time?
Science doesn’t claim ultimate truth. That was the point of my whole post. You’re much more likely to see scientists saying ‘This is the current thinking as we have it now, but it will change and be updated as facts warrant.’
The reason people should use the scientific method is that it does a great job of sorting out bias and showing us what’s going on as close as we can comprehend. Nothing else does this. If you’ve got any alternate candidates, I’d love to hear about them.
I said this once before (and as it turns out, so did Carl Sagan), but if anything worked better than science, I’d dump science and use that.
29 October 2007 at 9:32 pm
I can think of many situations where science doesn’t ‘work’. Relationships, human rights, peacemaking, parenting, art to name a few. While religion has had some usefulness in those areas so despite my antipathy to it in general on epistemological grounds I think something other than science may be required to ‘work’ in the richness of human experience.
29 October 2007 at 11:51 pm
Snowqueen, perhaps you should take a look at some of the social psychology research before dismissing the application of science to human relationships. Experiments on prejudice, parenting styles, and peacemaking have all shed light on human behaviour, and in some cases have provided useful responses to social issues.
In addition, think about what you use in your everyday relationships. Suppose someone is angry with you and you don’t know why. Would you not construct a hypothesis as to why they are angry, then react accordingly? And then if your attempts to make peace did not work, wouldn’t you change your hypothesis and try something else? The scientific method is useful and is used in many aspects of human life where religion can at best give broad and generic commands to “love thy neighbour”.
30 October 2007 at 10:37 pm
The closer you get to humans, the harder the science gets.
But does science fail in these areas? I’d say it depends on what questions we’re trying to answer.
If you want to try to predict what an individual is going to do next, then that’s going to be sort of difficult to do using the scientific method. (Or anything, really. What else would you use?)
But if you’re looking for patterns in human populations, that’s easy. People use science to examine this stuff all the time. Yes, in relationships, parenting, etc.
One thing though — science is more descriptive, less prescriptive, so if you’re looking at what should happen in a certain situation, then science might have less to say. I see the ideal as science + ethics. (Even then, the two aren’t separate. Evolutionary theory can inform our views of why we have certain moral leanings, etc.)
The only way science ‘wouldn’t work’ in these areas is if there were no patterns, everything completely random. Otherwise, we can use the scientific method to see what patterns we can find in human behaviour.
Maybe there are a few gaps to what we can examine using the scientific method, but for those areas, anything else would do even worse.
31 October 2007 at 12:03 am
Stephanie, in terms of locally negotiated solutions I definitely agree that we apply a type of empirical process. But I don’t think humans are predictable enough (consistently) for us to operating much outside trial and error. If having successful relationships is enhanced by scientific method then how come so many very bright people are crap at relationships lol? I don’t have the same faith in social psychology though I agree that it can shed ‘some light’ but most of the research is deeply flawed because patterns in human behaviour are rarely as reproduceable as psychology would like us to believe – and that is because we are mediated by culture, society and history. Most social psychology is imbued with western cultural norms and makes a whole load of a priori assumptions based on very dubious and tenuous ground.
Daniel – I broadly agree with what you’re saying but I don’t agree that science has anything useful to tell me about parenting! Also these ‘patterns’ you speak of – are they real or are is one of the great human achievements ‘seeing’ patterns?
And good luck to you too! (When’s it due?)
31 October 2007 at 5:24 am
Of course culture plays an important part in peoples’ thoughts and behaviours, but underneath cultural differences, we are all human. So while there is undoubtedly variation in social psychology, some generalisations are still valid. Two people from different cultures may have different ideas about what is an acceptable distance to stand from someone, but they will both feel uncomfortable and try to retreat if you get within their boundary.
As for science and parenting, I believe science can tell parents some useful things. For example, the finding that an hour’s less sleep can substantially affect a child’s ability to maintain attention may change a parent’s rules about bedtime.
31 October 2007 at 7:14 pm
I think I may have a concrete, real world example here.
My son Jackson was born with a congenital defect called PFFD. A long name for what is a short femur. We have been working with Children’s Hospital in Seattle to come up with a treatment plan for him. After talking with many doctors doing many MRI’s and doing our own research we all came to the conclusion that the best treatment or him (and really the only option for him) would be a fusion of his small femur, knee, and tibia to create a usable femur and then an amputation of his foot to fit a prosthetic that will includea knee joint for him. He is now calling it his robot leg and is excited about the new mobility it will give him. He is 4 years old.
So we sit down with the surgeon and he is very detailed in explaining all the surgical options available to us. As it turns out, the current “best” method (and by best I mean if you take all emotion out of the equation and just look at the studies: what technique gives the results that last longest, and give the amputee the strongest, best working platform for the prosthetic) is to reattach the foot backwards and use it to create a new knee.
makes perfect, logical sense. But here is the rub. The foot has to be reattached whole to work. So while this makes no difference while the prosthetic is on, it just “looks wierd” to have a floppy foot of toes hanging off the back of your knee when the prosthetic is off. (like during love making when the patient is older). That is why almost No-one chooses this method, eve though its scientifically the best. I think this may speak to why a scientific approach does not always work best for human solutions. Culture and history and quality of life must also enter into any treatment plan.
31 October 2007 at 11:06 pm
They are good examples, Stephanie, although you seem to assume a particularly high level of power of the adult over a child. I have one child who sleeps as soon as her head touches the pillow and the other who has never managed to get to sleep before 10pm IN HER LIFE!!! She’s now 15. Hasn’t been for want of my trying to help her sleep earlier. I would say there is very little underneath culture and conditioned behaviour and I wouldn’t dismiss it in favour of imagining some ‘human’ givens. I actually trust genetics to tell me more about humans than psychology.
That is a fascinating story, jeffrey, and a hard decision to have to make. Again it’s interesting that an amputation is somehow better than remaining with a foreshortened leg (let alone the foot/knee option!) – as an occupational therapist I can absolutely see why the amputation route is preferable, but the critical theorist in me would also look at the discursive practices around the body and ideas of normality.
31 October 2007 at 11:31 pm
Man, I hope that surgery goes well for your little guy. I saw that process on a TV show recently. It’s absolutely amazing what they can do.
It seems to me that what you’re saying is that we don’t make decisions like robots would. Fair enough — human decision-making has a lot of factors in it.
We can still examine human behaviour in the aggregate, to look for patterns though. It doesn’t fall outside of scientific analysis. It’s just trickier to spot the patterns.
snowqueen seems to be saying that we can’t find patterns at all, but that would only be true if humans acted randomly, which they don’t.
And now for snowqueen:
Better Parenting Through Science!
Step 1: Observation
I notice that Youngest Boy is angry because his older brother has been picking on him.
Step 2: Hypothesis
I suspect that out of my options (punishing Older Brother, giving him advice, listening to him), that listening would be best.
Step 3: Experiment
I decide to try listening to him. He tells me how frustrated he is, and how when he gets older and bigger, Big Brother’s going to get it. I try some tips from my STEP parenting courses, including reflective listening and (after listening,) helping him decide what he should do in such a situation. We work out some ways I can help him, including talking to Older Brother, which I do.
Step 4: Conclusion
A somewhat successful outcome. Youngest Boy feels happier, and Oldest Boy knows there are boundaries to his behaviour. I decide tentatively that for his personality, and the situation, this was an effective treatment. Further reseasrch is needed to determine the range of situations for which this method is effective.
Trying stuff, then keeping what works, is science. Even though my experimental design isn’t the most rigourous.
31 October 2007 at 11:49 pm
The choice of amputation and prosthetic was a very practical one. There are physical activities that Jackson is very interested in doing and he won’t be abble to with pddf. The prosthetic will give him so much more freedom.
Not choosing the foot option however has everything to do with ideas of normality. I am new to parenting but I do think one of my jobs is to help my child eep as many options open to himself as possible so that he can have a large range of choices when he is ready. While I am glad that he lives in a time when prosthetics are considered “normal”, I don’t think we’ve reached a point where many potential partners wouldn’t be put off by a backward foot during the start of a relationship. I could placate myself by saying that if they can’t take it they aren’t good enough for my son anyway but that just doesn’t ring true to me, it sounds like something people say when there is no choice, and given the choice I want him to have the chance to attract the most number of choices he can.
1 November 2007 at 1:19 am
It’s true that genetics can tell us some useful information about humans, such as some physical features. But while psychology may have difficulty predicting how an individual will act in a particular situation, if given a choice, I’d favour psychology over genetics. I’m surprised that you wouldn’t, snowqueen, as psychology takes into account factors such as cultural influences and personal history, while genetics doesn’t.
I’m excited for your son, Jeffrey! Hope the surgery goes well.
1 November 2007 at 3:26 am
I find psychology and medicine to be very interesting and complicated subjects for this discussion.
First, and I think people often confuse the two areas, these two disciplines are really split into two worlds. The scientific and the clinical. The two worlds have different approaches and different goals but depend on each other.
Second, I hate it when I hear people (Tom Cruise comes to mind)that “glibly” say they are not real science or not a “hard” science. The fact is that they both are as scientific as the methods of research that are employed by the practitioners. And like most scientific endeavors they are both informed by many other scientific disciplines.
I think the problem comes from misunderstanding of both of these things. You see good doctor clinicians and clinical psychologists taking all the scientific information in they can from anywhere they can and trying their best to use this information in a practical way to improve the lives of their patients. The clinicians choices may not always be correct or “scientific” but the clinical setting IS where the scientific theoretical rubber hits the real world road. Data from these clinicians is then fed back to the scientists who then use it to refine their hypothesis or to disprove it. and so we progress.
You also get socially irresponsible people who use a simple idea backed by a few studies to sell a million books and get a cable show deal.
Then you get the doctors who are to lazy to look at the information and see drugs as a cure for mental problems instead of just one possible tool to be used in a far more complex treatment plan.
To Snowqueen while I agree with many of her worries about psychology in general I have to say that if the methods of any given study are flawed then they are up for review not only by their peers but by the entire scientific community.
And to Daniel the original intent of my constant questioning isn’t against your reasoning but because I’ve seen you go through so many serious life changes in such a short period of time. (In the last three years you have dealt with things most people do in decades and most never even do all of them) It only seems caring and yes, reasonable, to question the possible emotional reasoning that may be hiding behind a logical mask. I’m not saying there has to be something but I wonder how much you’ve allowed yourself to contemplate that question.
And last thanks to all of you for your kind words about Jax and happy samhain. I had a blast taking him trick or treating tonight and he looked so cute dressed as a giraffe. Yes, Mr. horror fest dressed his son as a cute giraffe for Halloween. Go figure.
1 November 2007 at 2:31 pm
[airy wave of hand] Oh, I’m fine. Everybody goes through stuff. What’s new? Thanks for your caring.
1 November 2007 at 2:32 pm
And I couldn’t find my logical mask, so I had to go as a pirate ninja.
1 November 2007 at 11:14 pm
Daniel – yes I completely agree with what your example – that is what I would consider a locally negotiated solution – the result of an empirical process through logical reasoning. I have no problem with that whatsoever but I don’t think that is the same thing as ‘science’ because it’s not a reproduceable experiment because the conditions could never be repeated – it is contingent. That is precisely the point that post modernists are trying to make – it’s relative. ‘Science’ is more about universals, generalisability, transferability etc.
I don’t think there aren’t patterns, just that there is no such thing as patterns unless there’s a human observing them.
You hit the nail on the head when you said that science is descriptive – what is a description other than a linguistic representation? But science can only ever tell us about how the world appears to humans because we are the ones creating the language to describe it. It is fair enough to critique and, if necessary, review that language as the cultural, social and historical contingencies shift – that is what critical theory (one of those pesky postmodern strands) sets out to do.
If it didn’t we’d still accept that those darkie natives in Africa are primitive savages or that the solution to disability is eugenics.
Just because humans don’t act randomly it doesn’t mean they act predictably.
Stephanie – you and I will just have to disagree about psychology. I have studied it in the past and continue to be involved in disciplines where I am in contact with it and it’s because of that that I am sceptical of its claims. My colleague who teaches psychology is very concerned by the lack of willingness to critique psychology within the profession itself.
Jeff – you are a great parent – Jackson is very lucky and little Lilly Penny too.
and I was a zombie. There is evidence on my blog.
2 November 2007 at 1:01 pm
I have no problem with that whatsoever but I don’t think that is the same thing as ‘science’ because it’s not a reproduceable experiment because the conditions could never be repeated – it is contingent.
It depends on what counts for a replication. If you’re requiring conditions to be repeated exactly, then yes, my parenting experience can’t be repeated. But if that’s what you’re requiring, we can’t do anything. We can’t do medical research because every case is different. We can’t do experiments physics or chemistry because that combination of atoms will never be in the same place again. Fortunately that level of specificity isn’t required in science. We can examine a number of cases and generalise.
The impression I’m getting, snowqueen, is that you’re doing science, but you don’t think you’re doing science.
3 November 2007 at 2:00 am
No, I know I’m doing a scientific process. But I don’t pretend that it means absolute knowledge. It is adequate *and* contingent – that isn’t a problem as you rightly point out. However, what you’ve argued for is the postmodernist view of science – relative rather than absolute. Once you adopt this perspective then at the fuzzier end (away from material physics) the questioning of accuracy, usefulness, etc. become more important because the implications tend to be more significant to human populations.
I have no problem at all with science – I have no truck with nonsense like astrology and homeopathy and theistic beliefs which are at the other end of the continuum. I’m defending postmodernism (which is misrepresented by those that imagine that science is about essentialism) which is not antithetical to science, it merely provides a particular critique which is useful to combat what I see as scientific fundamentalism.
Why does your comments box never accept the word verification the first time round?
3 November 2007 at 2:36 pm
I was checking out the Wikipedia page on the scientific method, and I found this bit that seemed pertinent to this discussion:
The postmodernist critiques of science have themselves been the subject of intense controversy and heated dialogue. This ongoing debate, known as the science wars, is the result of the conflicting values and assumptions held by the postmodernist and realist camps. Whereas postmodernists assert that scientific knowledge is simply another discourse and not representative of any form of fundamental truth, realists in the scientific community maintain that scientific knowledge does reveal real and fundamental truths about reality. Many books have been written by scientists which take on this problem and challenge the assertions of the postmodernists while defending science as a legitimate method of deriving truth.
Though if I were re-writing this (which I guess I could), I’d add something I’ve seen written elsewhere: that science helps us to construct models of reality, which will need to be changed from time to time, as I said in the original post.
But anyway, it seems that we’re on either side of a Great Debate. Which means it’s not going to be solved on this page.
Some particular beefs: I really don’t know what to do with some of your claims, like this one:
I don’t think there aren’t patterns, just that there is no such thing as patterns unless there’s a human observing them.
Is that testable? Oh, but then lack of testability is only a problem if you’re bound to the scientific method. And so into the fog it goes.
I also think you’re putting up some terrible straw men, making science out to be rigidly deterministic, or saying that scientists claim it shows absolute truth. Your ideas about science are not what scientists say about science, though I think it might be what post-modernists say about science. (And your claim that I’m describing ‘relative science’ or ‘post-modern science’ are really reaching.) I’d recommend reading through a page about the scientific method (perhaps the Wikipedia page, or this one even though it’s for kids), just to see the kinds of claims that scientists actually make about the scientific method.
Finally, as you point out, I think that although we disagree on some of the theory, we find ourselves on the same side of most of the practical matters. It reminds me of the joke about the French philosopher who said “Yes, it works in practice, but what about in theory?” I’m glad you’re not a believer in astrology or homeopathy or theism, if only because these things don’t work. By contrast, I’m glad that you’ve given me some ideas about how post-structural theory can be useful.
4 November 2007 at 2:19 am
I’m sorry Daniel but isn’t there a bit of a contradiction in these two statements?
“realists in the scientific community maintain that scientific knowledge does reveal real and fundamental truths about reality”
“I also think you’re putting up some terrible straw men, making science out to be rigidly deterministic, or saying that scientists claim it shows absolute truth.”
My comment about patterns is no weirder than Schroedinger’s cat (http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi347.htm
I studied science to A level and have read a huge amount of science books (Dawkins, Pinker, Stewart, Humphrey, Dennett, Feynman to name just a few) and read New Scientist and Edge regularly – I love science. It’s humans’ greatest invention after face to face sex. But it isn’t the answer to everything. That sort of certainty belongs to blind faith like religion.
4 November 2007 at 6:44 am
Thank God this post finally got to sex. And yes, why do I have to enter my word verification twice on your blog.
From Snowqueens side… Daniel, do you look to science as an absolute authority for truth or as the best we can do to understand the world we find ourselves in? And I already know that you have admitted that we can’t just use scientific facts to make decisions like what how can I make myself happy and what genetic code makes the best human. To me truth is an idea, an ideal, not something that actually exists. We each one of us take in all the information we can and make our own truth. While we share a lot there is no way my reality can ever be the exact same as your reality.
From Daniels side… Snowqueen, I’m not sure what the point is. You agree that science is the best tool we have to explain the physical world around us. Is your problem with the institutions of science? I don’t see you having any problems with the method itself.
From Jeffreys side… A basic part of my deconversion was a distaste for anyone, institution or idea that espoused an absolute truth. For all I know our universe is a perverse joke being played out in the bedroom of a three year old creature. I will always keep with me the caveat that I may be wrong, and pointing to history that I probably am wrong in at least 80% of how I think about the world around me.
I worry daniel that after having spent 35 or so years in a world that not only espoused those ideas but felt the need to recruit others to think the same way that your first impulse upon freeing yourself of that world was to do the same thing with the ideas that freed you. Does that seem like a reasonable concern to you?
5 November 2007 at 12:10 am
This discussion is about the scientific method, dammit, not me. But I suppose this is my own fault for making the blog a semi-personal one.
So I’ll just say (yet again) that I’ve found science to be a much better tool than anything else I know of for figuring out what’s going on.
Daniel, do you look to science as an absolute authority for truth or as the best we can do to understand the world we find ourselves in?
Tell me where I’ve claimed that science gives us absolute truth anywhere on this blog, anyone.
I will redirect you once again to the original post, which even now still sits atop this pile of comments, seemingly unread.
Me: Yes, our scientific understanding changes. The ideas we hold as true will in 100 years’ time be superceded by better and more refined knowledge.
and
There’s so much to learn about our universe, and the scientific method is the most successful way to do that.
jeffrey — You mentioned the truth. I like to think of it this way:
Imagine that a neighbour is picking coloured balls from a container, and telling you the results from across the fence, whether black or white. You can’t see her, and it’s noisy from traffic. A reasonable question would be: Given that I heard her say ‘black’, what is the probability that she actually said ‘black’? Or ‘white’? You don’t have access to the result directly; all you have is a flawed observation, and some idea of how to turn that into a reasonable approximation of what happened.
This is how I imagine the job before us. We don’t have direct access to the truth because of our limited comprehension (including bias and what not), so we have to construct a model that approximates reality as best we can based on our empirical observations. However — and this is the important bit — as incomplete as that model may be, it’ll do better than any non-scientific method. As always, I invite input to the contrary.
My advocacy for science is pragmatic, not ideological. I don’t really know how to make this any clearer.
I’m sorry Daniel but isn’t there a bit of a contradiction in these two statements?
No. Fundamantal is not the same as absolute.
I don’t know what’s happening with word verification. Maybe I’ll try turning it off and seeing if I get comment-spammed in the first 15 minutes.
Face-to-face sex is overrated.
5 November 2007 at 5:25 am
Bwaaahahahahaha. I love your sense of humor Daniel. Sorry if I have usurped your very obviously subject driven blog into a personal communication device. I’ll do better, just like I have with your name.
5 November 2007 at 10:52 pm
You’ve obviously never done it with the right person then.
5 November 2007 at 10:58 pm
Seriously though … fundamental may not be the same thing as absolute but I think you’re splitting semantic straws there.
By saying that ‘we construct a model that approximates reality’ you are taking a stance much closer to post-modernism than you’d like to think 🙂
Great discussion though!