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Re: Re: Still more thought
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The idea that nothing is real or that there is no objective reality is, in my opinion, false. I think it arises from the envy of those who just can't hack the math. But the controversy that exists among practitioners of the hard sciences, as well as the frequency with which the accepted paradigms are revised, tells us that "hard" may be a very wishful adjective. There are just too many ways in which subjective issues can influence or even alter scientific "truth". Moreover, applying scientific rigor to everything can quickly lead nowhere. Some things, in fact, most of the important questions, are simply not vulnerable to scientific attack. As always, the answer to this argument resides in the shady middle ground

Soros covered this ground very elegantly in his lectures, based on the philosophy of Karl Popper. He insists there is indeed an objective reality independent of our psychology. But he also cautioned on lumping into that reality many fields which are too susceptible to human reflexivity, such as politics and economics. The methods of physics are appropriate, to understanding physical phenomena. They can't help you decide whether you're really in love, or how to organize an infantry division.

Cloaking psychological or social phenomena in Graeco-Roman terms and spicing up the monographs with a few equations doesn't mean they are necessarily scientific. The behavioral sciences ARE worth studying, but they demand other methods, and success is measured in different ways. Actually, I think the proper way to explore the "fuzzy" sciences is with art. Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, in fact, any good novel can tell us much more about the human psyche and group behavior than a battalion of social scientists.

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