Re: truth
JLNobody wrote:Frank, your phrase, "getting closer to our understanding of the world", inspires the notion that understanding involves two events, (1) asking meaningful questions and (2) answering those questions to our satisfaction. These two steps reflect the pragamatism of Charles Saunders Pierce. Knowledge in this sense is the goal of purposeful inquiry. I would suggest that if and when we encounter phenomena that are completely exotic, meaning that we cannot even begin to ask questions about them--as is most likely in the case of sub-atomic physics. We are likely to overlook the phenomena, or at least to archive it in a file of "anomalies for future consideration." Without questions we cannot puruse the answers that are "knowledge". I suspect we are at that stage regarding the anomaly of dark matter--we are trying to formulate sensible questions.
And I sincerely hope we continue to do so. That was the reason for my remark wishing that more of our national treasury could be used in this way - rather than in proving to the world how tough we can be if provoked.
truth
Frank, I agree, of course. I would also like to see other reallocations of our nation's wealth. Mostly these would involve rescinding the tax cuts for the wealthy. I kwould spend most of that and other misallocations to forming larger, technologically more advanced intelligence agencies--for international rather than domestic survellience. I would examine more carefully our meat industry, the maintenance of the security of our ports, and I would form an oversight agency to supervise our many--and recently deliquient--environmental, food/drug, and investment regulatory agencies.
Yeah, JL, I agree.
There certainly are better ways of spending money than they way we are right now.
Well ! well !
Strange bedfellows indeed !
Just before we drop off perhaps the thought might cross our minds that most "research" is funded by either defense budgets or economic rivalry. Both space probes and the computers with which we analyse their data (and joke with each other) are a direct spin-off from warfare. Even the Ancient Greek mathematicians murdered each other over what we now might call "pure knowledge" because it was then considered to be"secrets of the divine".
Thus the definition of "purposeful enquiry" is somewhat problematic.
truth
Fresco, I'm not sure I grasped your point, but "purposeful" has to do primarily with epistemology, the motives driving inquiry. The motives might just as well be ethical or unethical (depending on the value system).
JLN
This was a rejoinder to the "ethical stance" in your previous post. It seems that "curiosity" is not sufficient in itself to generate "knowledge", and "purpose" is usually "competitive" as opposed to simply "pragmatic". It might be an interesting thread to consider whether knowlege itself is ever "ethically neutral".
Well, I'm certainly willing to agree with Fresco's sub-text.
Just about everyone I know has benefited personally from research done on behalf of the military.
The offal is enormous.
truth
I also agree, Fresco. The pursuit of knowledge is not always, and never completelyl, "disinterested." At least this seems to be the case for academic research. In my more than two decades of academic research, I and virtually all of my colleagues selected topics that were essentially in vogue and fundable by the large gov't funding agencies. The only freedom I felt was that I could choose the general topics that I would more or less sell-out to. And sometimes I would choose the freedom of topics that did not require much financial support and suffer the consequences of the low prestige within the university for such research--because it did not bring in money to the institution from the overhead of large grants. I imagine that the only disinterested inquiry is that of "amateur philosophers" like ourselves. At least the interest that exists reflects not much more than the shape of our personalities, our drives to find "satisfactory" ideologies. This is pragmatic in a general sense, if only because--like all thinking and inquiry--it is motivated. But this is a trivial fact. An "unmotivated" action is a veritable contradiction in terms. There is the distinction between a wink and a blink. The first is an intended action; the second just an unintended reflex.
This is also kind of like the debate on what the media covers, though. The government is more likely to fund certain kinds of pursuits... why? Because the public likes it. Big fancy hi-tech weaponry -- oooh! Space exploration -- ahhh! Neutrinos have mass -- uh, OK.
So the genuinely worthy but not so sexy stuff gets tied to the crowd-pleasers.
