Leadingchurch.com

The Guardian

Many people were also enraged by Kuhn’s description of most scientific activity as mere “puzzle-solving” – as if mankind’s most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn’t mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort. The unconscionably expensive quest for the Higgs boson that has recently come to fruition at Cern, for example, is a prime example of puzzle-solving because the existence of the particle was predicted by the prevailing paradigm, the so-called “standard model” of particle physics.

But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn’s account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There’s no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn’t that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?

Kuhn’s book spawned a whole industry of commentary, interpretation and exegesis. His emphasis on the importance of communities of scientists clustered round a shared paradigm essentially triggered the growth of a new academic discipline – the sociology of science – in which researchers began to examine scientific disciplines much as anthropologists studied exotic tribes, and in which science was regarded not as a sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment but as just another subculture.

Really? The ugly truth about this show hasn’t always been obvious? Link

Dreher link which lead to Haidt’s link. 

Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.” When self-interest, partisan identity, or strong emotions are involved, reasoning turns into a lawyer, using all its powers to reach the desired conclusion.

 

Boston

Should psychiatric patients who are not in physical danger of death have the right to die in the Netherlands? 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/can-an-atheist-really-get-dante

The secret writing on the door is “Abandon skepticism, all ye who enter here.” To approach the Divine Comedy with an open heart is to be converted on some level, if only for the time being. The late American Dantean Charles Singleton put it this way in a retrospective essay: “It is quite conceivable to me (though I confess I do not know that it has ever happened) that an out-and-out atheist might achieve an understanding reading of the Divine Comedy through a willing suspension of disbelief and an imaginative and sympathetic surrender to the experience of the Poem.” The question is, Can one make such a surrender and remain unchanged by it? I doubt it. It seems unlikely that imagination and sympathy can be so deeply engaged without leaving traces in memory and planting seeds in reason. However that may be, the precise relationship between art and belief is a mystery and must remain so until we are imparadised with Dante.

Jesus Creed

Ars technica

As Facebook itself knows from watching people type up statuses or comments and then delete them before posting, people feel pressure to say or do the right things when using services like Facebook. Part of that feeling stems from the breadth of the audience; when you want to say something about the latest Fox News broadcast, but your whole social network is politically mixed, you are likely to hold back your comments.

There is also the aforementioned identity creation aspect; Facebook gives people an opportunity to only present their best side, to only speak up when they are on a vacation, getting a promotion, or winning some kind of award. The best days of our lives happen so rarely, we don’t always have occasion to write something. The world can only take so many “bored, lol, what’s everyone up to tonight?”s. Continue reading →