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Howard Pattee wrote: Obviously, human knowledge of Nature
originates with human perceptions.
Obviously, all human knowledge depends on human experience. But there is no logic that says that human perceptions and experience can't discover properties of Nature over which humans have no influence, and there is plenty of experimental evidence that such properties exist. I actually agree with this, 100%. I wasn't arguing an opposing view
to this sentiment.
What I was arguing was that objectivity is relative. Science
doesn't exist outside of human minds, so it strikes me as rather silly
for science to try to divorce ourselves from ourselves in some vain and futile
attempt to achieve complete scientific "objectivity". I think we can
only be more objective or less objective, but not
totally objective-- because there is no way for us to be anything
other than human.
Trying to be more objective is an interesting conundrum...
for instance, how do we KNOW if we are being "more" objective? There is always a
danger, and I think science has been living in the danger zone for a long
time now, that our efforts to be totally objective are actually creating and
injecting more artifactual crap masquerading as information into our
attempts to learn about the universe and ourselves.
Part of he reason Aristotle's fourth category of causation (Final
Causation) and all notions of function or need/requirement are
anathema to physics is because of a fear that it imputes a human value
system on some non-human system. That may occasionally be a justified fear...
but it may also be true that the reason humans recognize the concept of function
in other organisms ("biological systems") is because, as organisms, we are
very well acquainted with functional entailments ourselves. It's built
in.
I was making the point in support of my father's position that
notions of function are not anthropomorphisms. These ideas are, he
said, perfectly scientific and can be "rigorously" studied via science. His
view was that "objectivity" is not the holy grail of science; knowledge is. And
he felt you can achieve knowledge while using objectivity in
moderation.
There was a James Thurber story he used to quote, from "Fables For
Our Times"... In it, a bear who was a raging alcoholic finally gives in to his
family's entreaties and stops drinking. In fact, he starts exercising and eating
health food and is so energized by how good he feels that he begins to
proselytize to everyone about the benefits of healthy living... and gets so into
his new addiction that he's just as bad off as when he was drinking. The moral
of the story was "It is just as bad to fall flat on your face as it is to bend
over too far backward." I think science equates a lack of objectivity with
falling on its face, but... in its drive for complete objectivity, it's
been bending over too far backward. In short; it's not good to become too
unbalanced.
Judith
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