Feynman, 1962: "The purpose of scientific thought is to predict what will happen in given experimental circumstances. All the philosophical discussion is an evasion of the point. The mesons do not go at the speed of light." (Note: "In particle physics, a meson is a strongly interacting boson—that is, a hadron with integer spin."——wikipedia, "Mason") I discussed the difference between scientific thought and social-scientific thought in my history of class a few meetings ago. My students were right in pointing out that there are different types of sciences (biology and physics, for instance) and different types of social sciences (history and economics, for instance) and that scientific thought is one things for physics and another for geology. At the end, I mentioned that ways of thinking were connected to communities that pose and resolve problems in particular ways and that our respective training consist in learning/becoming a member of a particular community. Feynman's community understands things that I do not know: speed of light and mesons (and hadrod, integer spin, and boson).
Sunday, November 2, 2008
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It has often seemed to me that studying any field of knowledge, and becoming a member of that community, is largely a matter of learning that fields, and that community's, vocabulary. This seems to fit in somehow with the thoughts expressed in your post.
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