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principia scientific international
A Pandemic? What Pandemic?
Published on December 1, 2020
Written by Dr Urmie Ray
1 “Whats in a Name?” The unprecedented measures imposed on world populations were justified by the supposed spread of a pandemic. Hence, to begin with, it is necessary to have a precise idea of the meaning of this term to be able to assess whether there has been a pandemic or not. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Whats in a name?
That which we call a pandemic. By any other name would be as devastating.” Well its not that simple, names are important because they are charged with connotations, and hence potent with consequences. In the case of a pandemic, a fundamental point is that it is variously defined...continues...
https://principia-scientific.com/a-pand ... -pandemic/
dada » Sat Dec 05, 2020 7:38 pm wrote:Why post that on this thread. Is it because a doctor wrote it? Because the word 'scientific' is in the name of the website?
§ê¢rꆧ » Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:28 pm wrote:
...Thanks dada for looking out for my thread. I appreciate keeping this thread to the science of the disease, and use the main coronavirus thread (or make a new one) for talk about the economics, civil liberties, and politics of the pandemic.
conniption » 10 Dec 2020 14:01 wrote:§ê¢rꆧ » Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:28 pm wrote:
...Thanks dada for looking out for my thread. I appreciate keeping this thread to the science of the disease, and use the main coronavirus thread (or make a new one) for talk about the economics, civil liberties, and politics of the pandemic.
Wish you folks had read more of the article before dismissing it's content as not scientific enough.
May I post the entire piece here so you can see there is much science and not so much on the politics?
I would do that for you...
3:AM: You’re a Wittgensteinian expert. So let’s start with Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism. You argue that there were three levels of hostility towards science from Wittgenstein. So what was wrong with scientism according to Wittgenstein, and did this bleed into his attitude to science itself?
BC: As you say, I think we can distinguish three levels of hostility in Wittgenstein’s remarks about science and scientism. There is hostility to the scientism that treats science as the only respectable form of enquiry and ignores the value of other kinds of investigation. There is hostility to the spirit in which contemporary science is conducted, which Wittgenstein thinks is the spirit that informs western civilization as a whole. And, occasionally, there are signs of an attitude that goes further than the anti-scientism expressed in these first two forms of hostility: hostility to science itself. I will say a bit about each of those.
First of all, Wittgenstein’s hostility to the scientistic tendency to take science as the model for all enquiry. His objection here is not to the institution or methodology of science as such; it is to the overgeneralization of scientific thinking to forms of enquiry where it is not appropriate. He is thinking of two features of scientific thinking in particular: its focus on causal explanation and its aspiration to achieve generality in its explanations. There are many areas of human enquiry, Wittgenstein insists, where neither causal explanation nor the search for general laws are appropriate.
...
Now for the second level of Wittgenstein’s hostility: his objection to the spirit of ‘the typical western scientist’ (Culture and Value, p, 7). Science, he writes, is driven by a commitment to making progress, to ‘onwards movement [and to] building ever larger and more complicated structures’; it involves an endless quest for novelty, ‘add[ing] one construction after another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next’ (Philosophical Remarks p. 7). Science values knowledge only as a means to an end. And ‘the spirit in which science is carried on nowadays’, he complains, is incompatible with a sense of wonder at nature: ‘Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again’ (Culture and Value, p. 5).
...Wittgenstein is not objecting to scientific method or scientific understanding itself but only to a particular spirit in which, in his opinion, science happens to be pursued.
But – and this is the third level – Wittgenstein does sometimes display outright hostility to science as such. ‘It isn’t absurd’, he says, ‘to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that that is not how things are (Culture and Value, p. 56). That goes well beyond the first two levels of hostility. Admittedly, he doesn’t commit himself to the claim that there is literally nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge; he only says that that idea ‘isn’t absurd’.
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