alQpr

Philosophy Talk: The Blog: William James and the Squirrel Example.
Yes, James does seem to be confounding a number of issues in that lecture
His resolution of the squirrel dispute (“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”) looks more like linguistic analysis than anything else, and his description of of the ‘pragmatic’ principle in the second paragraph as ‘If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle’ sounds more like a version of positivism.

It is only later in the piece that he identifies pragmatism with the kind of provisionalism that most scientists take towards their theories as being useful pro tem until they need to be refined in order to accommodate further observations ‘less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed’.

Freeman Dyson’s HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY as expressed in “the Edge” are a source of some disappointment and frustration to me. Skepticism about a bandwagon is always appropriate, and even more so is it about the various claims for proposed solutions. But to require a rigorous standard of proof in the face of a possible threat that is great enough to merit the precautionary principle and to present spurious “solutions” like adding .01inches of topsoil on every sqare foot of exposed land on earth (when in fact worldwide wherever we live we do many times the reverse of that) are just irresponsible.

Continue reading →