It makes the choice, because any other choice would not work.

If I add 1 and 1, I get 2. If I *choose* to think that 1 and 2 equal 2, then this equation would be utterly and completely useless for all intents and purposes, as reality would tend to disagree with me.

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

Work for what? Formal mathematical reasoning?
Or zero. There are perfectly valid numerical systems (say, mod 2) where 1+1 = 0.What you choose is the definition of 1, 2, and +. If you are trying to mimic reality, that's another issue altogether. Some math is done that way, some isn't.

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Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

Galileo was quite good with math; he was a self-study of Euclid, which caught the attention of Ricci -- the mathematician for the grand duke of Tuscany. Galileo, after acquiring the math chair at the U. of Pisa, demonstrated the errors of Aristotle through his and other's experiments.

During these early years, Galileo, unfortunately, also showed that the math he used did not hold-up under his own experiments. However, his modeling for falling objects was clearly superior to Aristotle. Galileo noted with obvious disappointment that there seemed to be more effort to criticize his work than there was to understand it.

Would the math in String Theory be another example of wonderful mental logic looking for a reality connection?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

If our objective reality can be constructed from logic and mathematics rather than fundamentally from physical observation then surely this removes the notion of an observer. This implies that objective reality can exist independently of us - that such a reality exists in the absence of the very factor which defines it, namely the notion of an observer. For me objective reality is a construct on our part that represents in a consistent manner our unbreakable, underlying and fundamental interaction with mind independent reality, and by definition cannot be defined in the absence of that interaction, and is an interaction that takes place in the only way possible - through our senses.

I think the notion of an observer within objective reality is important, it does not imply an individual person complete with subjective elements, rather it implies the fundamental connection that exists between the absolute consistency of the human condition and mind independent reality. That the connection is consistent to everyone allows an apparent separation of subject and object to take place when constructing our objective reality, and shows itself most forcefully at the quantum level - the outcome of quantum experiments is governed by the notion of an observer, how we set up the experiment determines the attribute of particle spin.

I consider the absolute reality of nature to be mind independent in nature and as such for ever inaccessible. That very inaccessibility for me assigns a notion of "something" that is beyond any reference to the way we model physical reality. To speak of such models as being a representation or an approximation of that "something" for me is meaningless. How can something ever be an approximation to something else if we have no idea of what that "something else" is? For me, objective reality is a construct by us and nothing more - it does not exist outside of our fundamental and underlying interaction with mind independent reality. The two entities, objective reality and mind independent reality (and to call mind independent reality an "entity" is misleading, but I have to label it as something) have, in terms of my understanding, nothing in common, the former is science, the latter belongs to philosophical thought. Can mathematics posses a relationship with mind independent reality (independently of our involvement) without assigning a scientific understanding to that reality? If it can only be done with our involvement, are we not then admitting to our physical interaction/observations as being our primary form of enquiry?

Meaning is pretty much use, in this case, the practices that surround Newton's writings on motion and gravity. Just to be clear, the angle I am pursuing in this discussion is that the notion of “model” can be misleading in philosophic discussions like these because often there really is no such model, and often, what is actually being discussed are human practices and their consequences. The subjective/objective dichotomy either vanishes under such a view, or it takes a different form of describing different aspects of human practice rather than some sort of “inner” and “outer” something or other where the “inner” is seen as an inferior copy of the “outer.”

What this suggests is that we cannot understand the world, but we can somehow understand a representation of it. (I take representation to mean: something that stands for something else.) Understanding is a matter of being able to make your way about in the world. If we can successfully act on information available in a representation, then we can just as well successfully act on information available in the world. The world can serve as its own representation.
Perception is the ability to tell things apart, to detect the differences that exist in the environment, whether they be differing intensities or frequencies of light, gradients of temperature, texture, motion, and so on. We don't see a projection; we act on differences.

You are looking at two things: the scene plus your sunglasses whereas I am looking at just the scene.
My ability to “tell things apart” may be hampered by glare, so I may not be able to make out all the details (the “differences”) you can. Notice that how well we each perform our task here depends on both us and the scene. We don't have to ascribe differences in our descriptions or actions to each of us being in possession of some model of the scene—with, perhaps, your model being tinted darker and containing more detail than mine.
(The central difference between our views is that you want to explain differences in behavior as indirectly proving the existence of intermediate models with themselves are different. I contend that we don't need such an intermediary to explain the differences. I hold that we can find the differences in the wider context.)

The meaning of words are, generally how they are used in practice. Practices succeed or fail for a number of reasons, but not necessarily because they are a model or representation of something else.
Science is not a process of constructing models, but of improving life. The folks trying to extract ethanol from switchgrass are working to do just that. What is changing is not a representation, but a way of living.
Here we actually do have two things to take into account: one, my act of carrying the bags, and two, my prior acts of carrying or dealing with groceries or playing at such in educational settings. Perhaps we can talk of one as a model of the other, but a better description is that it is a process of skill development and improvement.
I am not invoking a model. To put it in simple terms, experience has made me into a being that grabs an umbrella in response to the optical stimulus of rain. The point here is that I don't need to invoke an intermediary such as a model. I can respond to the world itself.
You set out to prove the existence of a model, but all you have shown is how you and your wife each respond to the information you each detected in the world. Putting it in behavioristic terms for a moment to illustrate the point: you are showing how each one's behavior is under control of a given stimulus. You want to explain the differences by suggesting the existence of differing intermediate models that you each respond to. But we don't need such an intermediaries. People can respond differently to the same event for a number of reasons including personal history, genetic factors, and so on. The wider context will explain the differences in behavior.

No, my argument does not require one of you to be wrong. You and I, I think, see eye-to-eye on that matter. I don't believe in truth like most people do, where a proposition is held to be either a more-or-less accurate model of reality. I think of knowledge in terms of skills like a golfer practicing to improve his putt. There is no model here. There is just the golfer on the golf course hitting a ball towards a hole with varying rates of success.

Although I've already dismissed this appeal to consequences, I decided to go back to it, and make a stronger argument against it.

Your position on science and objectivity, illustrated by the quotes above, is more exposed to creationist/relativist criticism than mine. A relativist could look at those remarks of yours, and say: "See? Scientists are irrational. They admit that the scientific method sets itself goals it cannot possibly achieve, yet insist that it is the best way to understand the world (in issues like, say, the origin of the species, or the age of the Earth, or the formation of the cosmos). And then they turn around and tell us the Bible isn't good enough for those things. What right have they to tell us that, when at the end of the day our method is perfectly analogous to theirs? Like them, we set ourselves admittedly impossible goals, but proceed in the faith that our method will nevertheless attain them! We're doing the same as they, except we choose to place our trust in a different method/source."

Indeed, they would not be able to.

Suppose you had taken Newton to a desert island as a child, and left him there, to grow up alone -- could he have ended up writing the Principia anyway? Your answer would apparenttly be "yes"; mine would be a resounding "no", for several reasons. I think this hypothetical example is worth analysing, because it has the potential to clarify the difference between my position on objectivity and yours, as well as what I meant when I spoke of "rational agreement" between scientists, which from remarks made by you and others I see that I have not yet succeeded in explaining well enough.

First, growing up alone Newton would never have learned to speak, read or write, as he would have had no need to communicate with other people. Without a language, how could he have put down his physics on paper? It's even doubtful that he would have been able to develop any clear ideas on physics without a language in which to express them, assuming that the study of physics would have still raised his interest to begin with.

But let's accept for the sake of the argument that Newton did manage to somehow develop a language, or that he learned it for example from recorded lessons you had left him on the island for that purpose. He would still have met another serious obstacle, summarised by his own words: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." In a desert island, there would have been no such giants to stand on. Newton's monumental work rested on foundations built by many generations of scientists and other thinkers who came before him, going back at least to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, and actually farther back even, to Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Aristarchus, and Archimedes, since the heliocentric model of Copernicus was a reworking of the geocentric system developed by some of these ancient authors. Could Newton have discovered all of this alone in a single lifetime? Even allowing for the possibility that he might have burned some steps (like geocentrism) more quickly, I cannot believe it.

There's more: when we say that Newton's work was built on the previous work of others, I think we should not interpret this only as a reference to the scientists who had preceded him in time, but also to several of his contemporaries, like Leibniz. I have little doubt that, had Newton not been in competition with Leibniz for the invention of calculus, he would not have gone as far in it as he did. For example, in Newton we find the first recogniseable attempt to define the notion of limit. It's rather vague and lacking by modern standards, but still no one else in his day got as close to a rigorous formalisation of this mathematical concept. Without the rivalry with Leibniz to push him forward, it's quite possible that he would never have concerned himself with such issues in the first place. Let me add: not only is scientific work grounded on previous and rival scientific work, but also on non-scientific contributions, including fierce criticism. Consider how Berkeley's attack on mechanics stimulated the development of calculus.

To conclude, I present a more subtle objection. Your Newton stranded on a desert island has been making some physical experiments using chronometers which you left him there to play with. Because of his reaction time, the figures he records will have systematic errors. Will he realise it? I suppose he might, if he was clever enough to replicate his experiments a few times under the same conditions, notice that there were slight variations in the results. But now he decides to study the phenomenon of human reaction time in itself. This varies slightly from person to person. Newton's experience, however, includes only the measurements he made. Using Occam's Razor, he may well make the mistake of assuming that reaction time is a universal human constant (similar to the gravitational constant). And the worst is not the mistake, but the fact that he will have no way to realise that this was an error. To do that, he would need to confront his measurements with those of other observers.

I think these few quotes capture reasonably well Ken's position about objectivity in this thread. It's clearly an empiricist position: observation (combined with Occam's Razor, which means theoretical simplicity), is the one true road to scientific knowledge. Hence the importance he assigns to observing "properly", which he defines as stripping one's picture of the object from all subjective elements, as thoroughly as possible.

It's my conviction that this view of objectivity, while at first glance quite reasonable, is flawed, and in some ways counterproductive to those of us who value science, as I'm sure we all do here. Since I feel I would not be able to do a better job in sketching the weaknesses of empiricism than Popper, I will borrow his words:

"[...] most of our assertions are not based upon observations, but upon all kinds of other sources. 'I read it in The Times' or perhaps 'I read it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica' is a more likely and a more definite answer to the question 'How do you know?' than 'I have observed it' or 'I know it from an observation I made last year'. [...]

We may say that The Times can be a source of knowledge, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We may say that certain papers in the Physical Review about a problem in physics have more authority, and are more of the character of a source, than an article about the same problem in The Times or the Encyclopaedia. But it would be quite wrong to say that the source of the article in the Physical Review must have been wholly, or even partly, observation. The source may well be the discovery of an inconsistency in another paper, or say, the discovery of the fact that a hypothesis proposed in another paper could be tested by such and such an experiment; all these non-observational discoveries are 'sources' in the sense that they all add to our knowledge."

This is from "Knowledge Without Authority", quoted in this page. I have not quoted much, for fear of copyright issues, but this lecture is worth reading in full, to truly understand his objections. It's not very long.

By the way, Len, I found another Popper lecture which you might find interesting. See part 3 here, "Realism and Subjectivism in Physics". I have no idea how sound his physics in that part of the lecture is, but even wrong ideas can sometimes be insipiring. As for the questions you've addressed me in your latest post, I intend to answer them soon, but meanwhile these lectures might give you a better idea of where I was heading with my talk of consensus, which I must concede I have failed to make totally clear.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Notice here, too, Ken that you say you are showing models, but all you show are human practices, in this case, of dealing with rain in a basin and the various contingencies that compressed water, temperature, and wind angle present. It's a matter of us dealing with the environment. It's not models all the way down; it's a progressive refinement of technique. And that happens out in plain view at the surface.

Joe, what about the various models of the atom (Thomson's model, the plum pudding model, Rutherford's model, and the quantum model)? Are they all real?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I would say that meaning is connection to familiarities. Use is what stems from meaning-- if someone uses Newton's writings to line their bird cage, it does not generalize the meaning of that document, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of its meaning based on lack of familiarity of the language and the observations that support it.
And what this misses is the extreme, indeed essential, value in understanding how the making of models mediates the use of models which in turn controls the human practices and consequences. You are basically saying "let's define a bridge as being on the other side", and I'm saying, let's have a concept of a bridge, it'll really help get to the other side.

And by "disappearing" that, you have also disappeared any meahing of objectivity. Thus, you have undermined science completely, and we are back in the days of the ancient Greeks sitting around philosophizing about reality rather than modeling it based on tests (the Greeks did some of the latter, but when they couldn't, they did the former. We can do the latter, and would be foolish not to.)

Yes, that is a very important model for exactly what we are doing. So useful is that model, it gets used all the time, with great success. If you are now saying "but that's not really true", I would just say, "no kidding, no models are really true".

That's exactly where you are mistaken. You don't do much physics, do you?

You don't do much physics, do you?

Again you are eliminating the bridge by simply "being on the other side". You will never build a real bridge that way, only a philosophical one.

That is a model, a model for the acquisition of knowledge. And it works very well for knowledge of some things, like how to golf, and very poorly for other things, like how to do physics.

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Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

I can grant you that everything I do, me being human, will be a human practice. Including forming words and measuring rainfall, and including making models.

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Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

I would say that it is more exposed to legitimate criticisms, because it is more clear on what science really is. At the same time, it is less exposed to false criticisms based on misconceptions of what science is.
That would be an example of a false criticism, based on misconceptions. Let's examine the misconceptions exposed by that quote:
1) the goal that scientists set cannot be achieved-- False, the goals they may imagine we are setting we can't achieve, but the actual goals are achieved swimmingly, just look around.
2) scientists insist that their way of looking at the origin of species is "best" in some absolute way-- False, it is best in the scientific way, which means it is best for doing certain things that involve objectivity and repeatability (like making predictions that work, for example).
3) scientists need a "right" to say what is true-- False, truth is not established by right, it is established by some chosen prescription, and science has such a prescription that does not involve any "rights of scientists".
4) religious people are choosing to place their trust in a different source-- This one's True! It is a foolish scientist that says they know that evolution really happened, and a smart scientist that says evolution is the best model for what happened that only invokes objective evidence and nothing else. If someone wishes to place their trust elsewhere, they have every right to do so in a free society, they merely need to be made to understand the price to pay for departing from what is objectively demonstrable (like the ability to function in an objectively competitive world).

Obviously not, what on Earth would make you think my argument suggests in the least that the answer to that would be yes? Newton himself spoke of standing on the shoulders of giants (never mind Hooke), that does not mean he was going with consensus it merely means that he benefited from language, other observations and other models, all objectively obtained. One more time: consensus of scientists is certainly part of how science advances, as a practical concern, as holds for all human pursuits that involve the sharing of knowledge (like, all of them). But it is not part of the definition of objectivity, as in what the ideals of science are, which can easily be seen from the fact that everything you mentioned about Newton in the desert would also apply to Van Gogh in the desert, or Robert Frost in the desert. Does that make Van Gogh and Frost scientists, by definition? No, therefore it is irrelevant to the definitions that distinguish science from nonscience.

Why did you leave out the making of models? I've mentioned that a hundred times, at least. The issue is what is the definition of objectivity that separates science from other pursuits that use data (say, religious texts) and make models (say, a benevolent God). Yes the models in science use mathematics, because the goals of science are quantitative. But the mathematics has an internal truth simply by virtue of following the rules of mathematics-- its "external" truth for science is entirely unknown in advance, is entirely determined by observations, and should not expected to be either exact or even consistent between the various different axiomatic choices that are useful to science. I just can't say it any clearer than that, and none of the objections you raise in any way compromise that position, only mistaken ideas about that position not stated above.

What a paper tiger that is! Of course not all our sources are direct, there is such a thing as an indirect source. But even indirect sources are based on observation, to whatever extent they may be viewed as objective. The difference between a set of direct observations and an indirect description that can be traced to a set of observations is only in the directness of the path, not at all on what it is ultimately based upon. That is also true about what is subjective-- obviously if someone is tracing a path to a subjective opinion, that is something different in an important way. Popper should recognize that indirect paths tend to mix subjectivities into what was intended to be fundamentally objective, and all that does is dilute the objectivity-- it in no way suggests science is not based on objectivities, it merely points out a pitfall to beware of. In short, it lives in the domain of "walking to Polaris", not walking north. If Popper is trying to say anything else, he is badly missing the point by failing to "shoot the messenger".

I'm afraid I take with a pretty large grain of salt the analysis of physics by people who have never done any themselves. In my experience, they really don't understand what they're talking about, but then, in my view even a lot of people who actually do physics have a strange idea about what it means. I feel that I am trying to present a kind of unification of what science really does with how one can step back from it and see it in the larger context of human pursuits-- and the crucial importance of the flawed but essential concept of objectivity.

I don't think Popper gets it, frankly. Like a lot of Joe Durnavich's argument above, it comes off like "this is what I see when I watch physicists work", failing to realize that the real question is, "what am I doing when I am doing physics?" If you want to understand what running a marathon is, you can watch people do it, and catalog all the behaviors you witness. Then you can indeed tell if and when you are doing it yourself-- but don't be surprised if, in doing it yourself, you obtain an entirely new insight as to what running a marathon is all about.

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Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

You said yourself that the goals cannot be achieved. Several times, and I even quoted some of them.

I think you need to take a chill pill, Ken.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire