The knowledge machine

 That ' s the title of a book my Michael Strevens, which I recommend. (Liveright, New York, 2020)Strevens presents his own take on the philosophy of science accessibly and persuasively. If you ' ve even dabbled in this area you ' ve heard of the so-called demarcation problem -- how can we tell science from pseudoscience -- and the two best-known modern conceptions of science, Kuhn ' s construct of paradigms and paradigm shifts, and Popper ' s construct of falsfiability. Strevens doesn ' t think Kuhn or Popper are quite right. However I would say that without quite realizing it, he ' s pretty close to Popper -- he just notes that falsification is often harder than it might seem. I won ' t back up and try to go machete my way through all that brush in a blog post, but I did want to respond to a comment -- anonymous, so I can ' t publish it anyway -- to the effect that " Atheism is a belief system. It requires faith. " Err, no. On the contrary.To make this simple enough for a blog post -- and it may actually seem too obvious -- the nature of science, the breakthrough that produced Isaac Newton and the revolution he sparked around the turn of the 18th Century, was that it refers for authority only to observable reality. Newton was actually religious, although he was a heretic. He did not believe in the trinitarian God, a sacrilege he was forced to conceal lest he lose his position at Cambridge. But he kept his religious beliefs entirely separate from his scientific inve...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs