Friday, April 25, 2003 :::
Because I'm a theorist, but more because I like to quibble, I'd like to say something about Kate Malcolm's Criticism of Pure Reason (point (1)). I'd like to suggest when numbers (data) are important, and when they are less so.I do think there is something useful to discussing the issues in the abstract separately from the data because the data will tend to be fuzzy and we will generally have a changing best guess as to what the figures are. So it helps to have a well-developed epistemology separate from that, so we at least know what we're looking for from the numbers. On a slightly different but related note, I find a lot of discussions in which someone asserts, in one way or another, that anyone who doesn't have the entire solution to the problem worked out in detail has nothing to contribute to the discussion. (Often this takes the form of suggesting that one is out of line to point out a problem to which one lacks a solution.) This, of course, is garbage; the best role of discussion is that we each contribute something and end up with a nice, tasty stone soup.
Now, it's not that I didn't sleep well last night, though I guess I really didn't, and it should very much be conceded that the point of the epistemology is that it should bear some connection to reality, which it lacks as long as no data are plugged in. My complaint about a lot of theoretical physicists wasn't so much that they had no data, nor even that their theories were unfalsifiable by currently feasible experiments, so much as that they didn't seem to care. (This was worse in the eighties, when Sheldon Glashow was driven to suggest that string theory be confined to math department and schools of divinity.) If anyone actually does something with my framework, then, I hope they trouble themselves to get the best data they can find, but I also think it's worth discussing framework issues and even getting agreement on them first, partly to keep parochial interpretations from creeping into any data once acquired.
::: posted by dWj at 10:15 AM
