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From: dcs2e@darwin.clas.virginia.edu (David Swanson)
Subject: Re: Heidegger
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Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 04:01:03 GMT
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In article <4p73so$m8p@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:

> Well, now we have reduced our differences to purely semantic ones.
> Why don't we agree that "things happen", that knowledge about which things 
> happen is possible, and that "science" is the name of the process whereby 
> we determine which things happen?

OK

> 
> We use "truth" as a shorthand way of saying that the same things happen
> whether we understand them or not. 

Turkeyshit.


For instance, when you thought you
> planted a broccoli and it came up cabbage, your honest belief in brocolli
> was "wrong", 

According to who?

and that had you a better understanding of the botany of
> such species you would have been more likely to be "right", 

yep.

i.e., had
> a closer approximation to the belief-independent "truth"?  


the what?

And finally,
> that your expectation of broccoli had no noticeable effect on the cabbage?


nope.


> 
> In other words, e pur si cabbage.
> 
> There are no extravagant logical positivist claims there. Logical positivism
> (following the law of unintended consequences) seems to have had as
> the main result of its existence the provision of a straw man for
> relativists to shoot at. As far as I can tell, it's otherwise extinct.
> 
> The reason to look at Galileo or Planck is ultimately to understand
> the intensity with which the moral primacy of objective reasoning should be
> upheld *against* the social construction arguments, which, make no mistake,
> were the ones the bishops used against the moons of Jupiter and the
> ones the Nazis used against Einstein and Bohr.


Those evil Nazis, condescending to Einstein and Bohr, rejecting new
theories for being - what? - not new enough.  And I hear they killed
people too.


> 
> I take this whole discussion very seriously because several historical
> incidents show that there is a profound moral obligation to take
> objective methods seriously. What the "truth" means in a philosophical
> context is a nice matter for discussion over beer. How the truth, 
> whatever that may be, constrains us and defines our world is, however,
> a matter for serious investigation, the techniques of which have been
> extracted at great effort and sometmes even great personal cost. Feel
> free, then, to debate what "truth" means. But please have the decency
> to maintain respect for the hard-won techniques that can tell a broccoli
> from a cabbage based on a single fossilized seed, and for the people who
> take the trouble to learn those techniques.


What skill could be more important in life?


> 
> mt
> 


David

"Resistance to the proposition that the essence of truth is freedom is
based on preconceptions, the most obstinate of which is that freedom is
a property of man."  Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," [Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit] translated by John Sallis, in "Basic Writings,"
(old version, 1977) p.126.
