Re: SUO: Re: Colorless Green Events Process Furiously
On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:00:26PM -0400, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> It was a commonplace of my education -- I am sure that just about
> every physics professor I ever had in that first couple of years
> invoked it as a cliche observation -- that one of the reasons we spent
> so much time fixated on the idea that particles were particles and
> waves were waves and never the twain shall meet, not to mention
> thinking that only one basis of description could be "God's Own
> Ontology", so to speak, was all to be blamed, not exactly on the fact
> that Indo-European languages have long maintained a form that
> distinguishes nouns and verbs the way that they do -- for the language
> itself is blameless -- but that people had somewhere got into the
> habit of drawing illegitimate conclusions about Nature from the
> structure of mere Language, and on this particular spit my teachers
> usually roasted the Ancient Philosophers.
Then your teachers were ignorant morons. Modern science *started* with
the "Ancient Philosophers", whom we can thank for introducing,
brilliantly, a world dominated by myth and unreason to logic, theory,
and empirical observation. Your reasoning should be so "illegitimate".
Chris Menzel