The economy -- are we replacing or repairing?

Don't deprecate what you can't duplicate.

jsw

Depends on the college. The college I know the most about, had very loose requirements on what was required. Although I know one friend that changed from engineering to physics in order to take a course he needed to get into med school.

=20 Dan

I have to agree with you here. I took theater classes (conveniently next door to the Chem building) to satisfy the humanities requirements and quickly saw that I could learn about small-unit management by running the set building crew and watching the directors convince tired actors give their best efforts over and over.

In chemistry, management amounted to giving the researcher a goal and checking in two weeks later, almost like an artists' colony. The contrast between chemists' and actors' interests, world views, motivations and work habits could hardly have been greater. [Can't find relevant Sir Francis Bacon quote]

Once on a business trip to Detroit we went to supper with the auto engineers and their wives. One of the wives commented on how unlike her stereotype of a narrowly focused electrical engineer I was. I'm usually a listener who doesn't lead people outside their comfort zones and hadn't really noticed.

jsw

Sounds interesting, but...

Amazone: 1 used from $331.75

-- Make awkward sexual advances, not war.

I'll suggest that works both ways. And when you define what you do as the thing most worth duplicating, you've feathered yourself a very comfortable, self-definitional nest.

An extreme example of this whole discussion is what Clarke said, that if a discipline can't produce falsifiable models, it isn't science.

That's a fairly recent idea -- maybe a century or a century and a half old -- and it was a case of scientists working in fields in which that part of the scientific method was producing useful (instrumental) results decided that was "science."

I'll say it again: Historically, there is no justification for it. The word "science" means "knowledge." Instrumentalism is an *approach* to science -- the very instrumentalism that produced that definition. Scientific realism, in contrast, is focused on knowledge, not on instrumental processes, and, while it also seeks verifiable models, it puts knowledge on top, as the ultimate goal. Methodology is a means to it but the instrumentalists have made it the goal itself.

I will not get into the metaphysical questions of science beyond this: Instrumentalism attempts to solve the epistemological question of justification for belief by narrowing it all down to experiment and falisification. Scientific realism retains a broader understanding of "knowledge," and allows room for such things as probing into nature (with microscopes, space probes, statistics, and other tools) to find out what is there. Instrumentalism doesn't care much about what is there, right now, in nature. It cares about whether it can predict what will be there at some time in the future.

It's a great method. But it's only a method. It works great with brainless dead things and things that never lived. It's less great with living things, particularly human beings. Given identical conditions, electrons in the aggregate will do the same thing over and over. The phenomena stand still. Humans don't. There are layers and layers of variables, and the science of studying humans in a social contest is far more difficult as a result.

We should mention that experiments go on all the time in sciences other than physical sciences. They're limited. They rarely reach sweeping conclusions, such as the conclusion that electrons are attracted to a positive charge. Psychology does better experiments and better predictions than most of the other social sciences. Econometrics has the best tools, which are being applied fiercely to a host of questions as we speak. They are still limited in producing broad generalizations. There are very few of them because experimental conditions can only occassionally be controlled.

With all due respect to the engineering mind -- and I do have great respect for it -- Clarke's comments reveal how that mindset, and the mindset of many physical scientists as well, deals with the question. They simply dismiss anything that doesn't fit into their definition and their model of how science works. Their method defines, for them, what is worth knowing. It's the extreme example of the instrumentalist's approach to knowledge in general.

I reject it, and I have good reason for doing so. As Stephen J. Gould put it, they're dealing with different "magisteria" while defining and evaluating other scientific activity (other magisteria) through their own, monochromatic filter. It's narrow-minded, ahistorical, and it ignores what is essentially different about studying the science of human beings versus the science of charged particles, for example. It's what happens when you don't take enough out-of-field electives in college. d8-)

I'll go off on a tnagent here, with apologies for self-indulgence, because it will give you a sense of where I'm coming from with this issue. Of all the things I've ever studied, the most important to me is the history of ideas, or, "How in the hell did we wind up HERE?" I came to it suddenly one day in 1969, when I was sitting in my academic advisor's office and he embarrassed me more thoroughly than any embarrassment I had ever suffered. He had a classical education and I had a typical public-school and land-grant university education. His father was a renowned professor of epistemology and he had degrees from Oxford and Princeton. In just a few words, he made me realize that I didn't understand anything important because I didn't know where our ideas come from. Everything I had learned was the result of walking into the middle of a conversation. And it left me ignorant and incapable of putting anything, from politics to mathematics, into perspective.

It turned my life around. I read Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, Aristotle... I picked up old classic books at random and read until I decided if there was anything worth reading further. I went through half of the Harvard Classics series. This went on for roughly 25 years.

And that's where I am -- a little dilettantish, but always looking for the big picture and the historical context. That puts me at the opposite end of the telescope from many of the people I've worked with over the years, in engineering-related fields, and with a five-year stint involved with medical writing and editing.

The irony is that I respect, and even envy in some ways, those people who have been so focused and have acquired deep understaning of their subjects. But I look at how they think and I'm glad to be a bit of a dilettante. I think that this instrumentalist approach to science that is so common today is almost comically narrow and misguided, however many great things it has produced. It's a magnificent tool. It is also fairly mindless. It is not all of science. It isn't even the best part, if your highest value is knowledge.

Ha-ha! I wonder if that engineer's wife thought that *mechanical* engineers were models of the Renaissance man.

Yeah, well, that must have been kind of unusual. At Michigan State, engineering students barely were given room to breathe. For a while, even their Freshman English classes were conducted *inside* of the College of Engineering.

Then perhaps you know the quotation I can't find.

I didn't see it in his essays.

Maybe it was from Roger Bacon, another early proponent of experimental verification, but I haven't located "Communia Naturalium" on line and my Latin isn't up to speed-reading anyway.

It was about the various types of minds and what satisfies them, intense human interaction for an extrovert versus the quiet intellectual contentment that serves a scholar.

jsw

Sorry, it doesn't ring any bells. If it was a Bacon, it much more likely was Francis.

I don't know any Latin.