Cosmologists study the universe at a level where records vanish, as we learn in this article: Best Time to Study the Cosmos Was More Than 13 Billion Years Ago. The physical world, with its stars and galaxies and background radiation fields, doesn’t leave us some sort of permanent record to study at our leisure. Information … [Read more…]
What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a … [Read more…]
I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims: It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165] No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of … [Read more…]
I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how … [Read more…]
In The Meaning of Truth, William James makes the claim: The pragmatist view … of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The `workableness’ which ideas must have, in order to be true means particular workings, physical … [Read more…]
William James made a claim which should be very disturbing to those who hold mainstream views of the nature of truth: The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a … [Read more…]
This article, One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead, gives an interesting summary of one important aspect of what is called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. [T]he uncertainty principle comes in two superficially similar formulations that even many practicing physicists tend to confuse. Werner Heisenberg’s own version is that in observing the world, we … [Read more…]
I hope that William James was his usual good-natured and tolerant self when he wrote: [T]he scholastic philosophy … is only common sense grown pedantic. [The Meaning of Truth, page 44 of the Dover reprint edition] He’s right, in general, but it’s sad that Catholic neo-scholastics in recent centuries seem to be pedantic without having … [Read more…]
In reading Richard Gregory’s Mind in Science, I find that he raises a seemingly plausible objection to those thinkers who `regress’ to seeing abstractions, including knowledge, in the objective world. He states his objection in a short and loaded way: [The psychologist Kenneth] Craik is suggesting that human inference has its validity and logical power … [Read more…]
I’ve advocated the view that our imaginations can encompass what God has created, what the Almighty has manifested in this Creation, but we need examples and stimuli — in a manner of speaking. We need to be courageous and open-minded in our responses to Creation if we are to learn from God, who has a … [Read more…]