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Yay, Tim!
In your comment: "One of the common themes in Rosen's
thinking is to remove unjustified a priori restrictions wherever they
occur," you really nailed down clearly one of the most salient aspects
of his approach to science (and everything else, really). In fact, I think this
was just a part of his nature from very early childhood. Perhaps this is what
comes from being a child prodigy who also happens to be the only child of two
very ordinary immigrant parents-- who both had large immigrant
families that each came to the US as a unit-- and who were
both trying to assimilate. They really didn't know what to make of him. I'm
sure they tried to cope with his active mind by trying to curb him and no doubt
they issued warnings and edicts based on them... which he (no doubt) tested and
found the warnings were groundless. If "P, then Q" works in the negative, too!
"If not P, then not Q" can be turned into a new encoding: "If the warnings are
groundless, then the parental edicts are baseless."
He said he figured out very young that it was better not to ask
permission to do something he wanted to do; it was better to just do it. If you
ask for permission, and it is withheld based on inapplicable fears (which they
would never concede)... then you have two choices: you can either
accept their decision, which doesn't seem fair... or you can do what
you wanted to do anyway. But once you have asked permission, if you go
against a parental edict, you have committed a much more serious sin! You are
insubordinate! Off with your head! If you just do it, without asking
permission, they may get mad after the fact, but then you just apologize
and that tends to settle everyone down.
In using this approach with science, though, he didn't apologize.
Probably because he considered everybody in that milieu as equals and
therefore he owed no fealty or familial respect to people who were trying to
rein him in based on their own fears. I would say that the only person he paid a
great deal of familial respect to was Rashevsky (his PhD advisor/mentor). In
many ways, Rashevsky was the father he never really had.
Judith
PS: Incidentally, I confess that I have
often been irked by the numerous times, in my father's published work, where he
gave far more credit to Rashevsky than was actually warranted. I questioned him
about this, once, and he said that since Rashevsky had arrived at a similar
conclusion (that whatever scientific law was not applicable), prior to Dad
being in Chicago, so he felt that Rashevsky deserved the credit for the insight.
My argument was; "Yeah, but Dad... YOU not only arrived at the insight on your
own, but you developed it. Why are you giving HIM all the credit for it?" He
just shrugged and couldn't really give me an answer that made sense to me beyond
that it was his own sense of duty and ethics (and sentimentality, in my view).
Dad actually loved "the old man" as he called Rashevsky. And Rashevsky was
shafted, big time, when Lewontin came to Chicago, etc. I think my father
always felt he had kind of left Rashevsky unprotected, by moving on to
Buffalo to pursue his own career.
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