söndag 10 november 2013

On the fundamental problem for science

When humanity began conceptualizing reality, ie, dividing it into things and kinds of things, it immediately split us between those of us that started the conceptualiztion from things, called nominalists, and those that started it from kinds, called "class-realists". These two approaches are actually orthogonal, ie, diametrically opposed, in that the assumptions of one are the deductions of the other. A class-realist thus can't understand how a nominalist can "know" that a certain thing is of a certain kind, whereas a nominalist considers this allocation to be more or less arbitrary in an aim to find general statements that can be said about this kind of things. Class-realists thus ask questions about what things "really are", whereas nominalists ask questions about what things do, ie, about processes that things participate in. The discipline of finding logical answers to questions, ie, "science" in its widest sense, has since then largely been a matter of a battle between these two ortogonal approaches.

The fundamental problems for these two approaches is that the former (ie, nominalism) is ambiguous in relation to the reality it discusses, and that every particular process thus can be described in several just as true ways, whereas the latter (ie, class-realism) ultimately leads to paradox (see Russell's paradox). None of them can thus produce the single truth humanity asks for.

These two orthogonal approaches can only be combined consistently in one way: in Plato's "Theory of Forms", although this combination gives rise to the questions what and where the world of Forms is. This combination is none-the-less the only consistent fusion of these two orthogonal approaches.

These facts leave "science" (in its widest sense) without any possibility to find the single truth humanity asks for. Class-realism has recently suggested that paradoxes (like the True tree of life" of cladistics and "Higgs particle" of particle physics) IS the answer (even claiming that "as a layman I would now say - I think we have Higgs particle"), although paradoxes are contradictions, not things. like their "layman's" "Higgs particle". If reality indeed could be explained by laymen, then why pay scientists like the particle physicists at Cern to explain it? This explanation is furthermore not new, there are many "monads" in the history of science.     
  

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