Steve Firth wrote:
On Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:21:48 +0100, Tony Polson wrote:


Why *should* anyone enlighten you?


Because if you don't then it makes your claims look like either
self-delusion or worse.


Does anyone else here care what you think,


Yes, I do for one.

Thanks for that!
Thus encouraged, let me expand a bit on my model of scientific method.
The big question in philosophy has always been (more or less) what can
we know? After Newton, that changed: he showed clearly what we know, and
so the question became How? How did he get to this absolute and
invariant knowledge? You see Kant in particular wrestling with this
question, but up to the start of 20C it was on everyone's agenda. So
science was seen as developing clever ways of getting at these brute
facts, and remarkably successful too; think of Clerk Maxwell,
interestingly able to "correct" Ampère's Law. Of course there was a lot
of careful experimentation but increasingly physics became dominated by
the theoreticians; as Rutherford put it: "All science is physics or
stamp collecting" -- and physics, one could say, was maths backed up by
experiment. Scientific law therefore embodied two vital facts:
repeatable experiment and an explanation. As Pope put it: "Nature and
Nature's Laws lay hid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light."

Then after Eddington provided some support for Einstein's gravitational
theory and propelled him into the limelight with his other theories,
everything changed. Squire put it neatly "It did not last: the Devil,
shouting 'Ho, Let Einstein be' restored the status quo". Suddenly the
whole concept of science changed: we cannot after all get at brute fact,
only make more-or-less inaccurate models of our world. Many of those
models aren't even required to make *sense* at all (in a matter-of-fact
sense): do superstrings "exist"? how does one understand the inside of a
black hole?

To my mind the best description of this change, and of what science is
(or should be) about, is Karl Popper (_Logic of Scientific Discovery_).
And Popper's argument is that, since we cannot know that a theory is
right but can discover where it is wrong, we should as he says, make our
mistakes as quickly as possible; science is the exercise of *destroying*
our theories, not establishing them. Because that destruction leads to
better theories: still probably wrong, but at least not wrong where they
were before. A corollary of this is that understanding is not, as was
generally believed, "explaining the unknown by the known" so much as
"explaining the known by the unknown": reaching towards bigger and
better theories to explain things we (wrongly) think we understand.
Science really advances when it experiences a paradigm shift: when we
throw out the "received wisdom" of earlier generations for new and more
exciting theories.

That's why I am interested in things like dowsing. There does seem to be
a lot of anecdotal evidence that it "works"; but excitingly it doesn't
fit our current theories of how things work. So we should either find
out where it doesn't work (testing to destruction the understanding of
the believers) or how we can incorporate it into a new theory of how
things work (testing to destruction the understanding of the sceptic).
(Or rather, the best approach will be a both-and, and hopefully done by
both sides together.)

Tony (if you bother to read this) doesn't that strike you as a
worthwhile thing to do?

Of course, meanwhile there will be awkward facts we don't understand but
must live with: Heaviside said "Why should I refuse a good dinner simply
because I don't understand the digestive processes involved?" Whether
dowsing is a good dinner or not I simply don't know. But I think James
Randi is unfair in the useful quote Steve gave us:

"Each dowser goes away from any trial of their powers, dismayed by their
failure, puzzled at the reasons for the failure, but always capable of
coming up with a reasonable to them excuse. That excuse may be any one
of many. It may be an unfortunate arrangement of the planets, improper
temperature or humidity, a problem of indigestion, too much ambient
noise or too much silence or a poor attitude on the part of the
observers". These might give us clues for useful areas of research: is
noise/silence a factor, those of you who have dowsed? is there a model
which could explain that? (Well, of course there are several; and those
which try to explain the successes in terms of making conscious some
unrealised knowledge might latch on to them; though they would probably
discover that they are stretching what they originally meant by
"knowledge".)

Sorry, for an OT post this has gone on far too long. But I'd still be
interested in feedback. Thanks for listening.

Douglas de Lacey





because I am sure I don't.


And that should make him (or anyone else) upset?