Re: Over to Aristotle Re: My views on evolution

Robert Grumbine wrote:
> Much snippage to digress to a topic now at hand that I'm more
> interested in, also change of subject to see if we can bring
> Wilkins out of hiding.
>
> In article <D9hJe.166$W22.72@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Deadrat <ephemera1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>"Stephen Montgomery-Smith" <stephen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>>news:1123391221.071068.148870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> [snip]
>
>>>I mean, those early forfathers tried very hard to get science to work,
>>>but even though people like Aristotle were great genius's, they simply
>>>didn't have the intellectual tools we now have to persue knowledge like
>>>we do.
>>>
>>
>>Aristotle, in particular, had the wrong "intellectual tool," namely the
>>idea that you could think your way to a valid explanation. The better
>>tool is the understanding that you have to test your way.
>
>
> I think you're tagging the wrong guy here. Plato, with the
> proverbial platonic ideals, was more in the school of simply thinking
> your way to the conclusion.
>
> Aristotle, even in Meteorologica, was much more involved with
> testing and observables. Not in a modern sense, to be sure, but
> far more than credited above.
>
> I'll also remind folks that being incorrect does not mean that
> you weren't doing good work.
>
> Example: on one hand, now known to be not a good way of proceeding,
> Aristotle discussed the nature of materials in terms of their balances
> of the elements. Not how we do it now, but no surprise there.
>
> But his classification as to what material properties _were_ was very
> solidly based on what is observable. One part of this was classification
> by how materials respond to applied force -- shatter/ooze/bend/...
> He also clearly had the notion of composite materials -- that the
> resultant property of layering something that might shatter (but was
> strong before the shatter point) with something what would ooze could
> be different than what you started with.
>
> This was definitely an approach that invited testing, and posed
> a research program (as we might term things today).
>
> If you engage in materials science today at any but the most trivial
> level (solid/liquid/gas), you use Aristotle's approach (though not
> vocabulary). Classification is by rheological properties, which is
> to say, how the material responds to applied force. Elastic, plastic,
> visco-elastic, brittle, ... would be the modern terms.
>
I agree with Bob here. Aristotle did not use apriorism *in his science*. To be
sure, his logic of *division* allowed him to reach the formal essence of some
object by definition, but he never, so far as I know, tried to do this in an
empirically addressable case.

Sometimes he repeated false reports (so did Darwin), and sometimes he
misobserved (so did Darwin) and sometime she allower prior beliefs to control
how he read a new case (so did... well, everybody). But most of the time, from
a standing start and with no technical apparatus other than his eyes, hands
and a sharp knife, he began physics, biology, meteorology, psychology and
anthropology.

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122

.

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