display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| Full Idea: What is the use of being a genius, unless with the same scientific evidence as other men, one can reach more truth than they? | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Clifford's famous principle. He isn't actually contraverting the principle, but it is a nice point about evidence. Simple empiricists think detectives only have to stare at the evidence and the solution creates itself. |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| Full Idea: Each tester of the truth of a theory …acts as if it were true, and expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his theory. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.42) | |
| A reaction: This is almost exactly Popper's falsificationist proposal for science, which interestingly shows the close relationship of his view to pragmatism. Believe it as long as it is still working. |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| Full Idea: That nature will follow tomorrow the same laws that she follows today is a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.39) | |
| A reaction: The stability of nature is something to be assessed, not something taken for granted. If you arrive in a new city and it all seems quiet, you keep your fingers crossed and treat it as stable. But revolution or coup could be just round the corner. |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| Full Idea: The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof solely by the size of a vulgar fraction, is as ideally inept as it is practically impossible. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40) | |
| A reaction: James probably didn't know about Bayes, but this is directed at the Bayesian approach. My view is that full rational assessment of coherence is a much better bet than a Bayesian calculation. Factors must be weighted. |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| Full Idea: Alongside the passion for simplification …is the passion for distinguishing; it is the passion to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.22) | |
| A reaction: As I child I dismantled almost every toy I was given. This seems to be the motivation for a lot of analytic philosophy, but Aristotle also tended to think that way. |