Hal Ruhl wrote:
>
>I do not think the conversation re:
>
>>>>>"I can't think of any historical examples of new
>>>>>mathematical/scientific/philosophical ideas that require you to already
>>>>>believe their premises in order to justify these premises",
>
>has a valid place in this thread. Can you tell me why you do?
Because you have said that your theory has this feature, and I was trying to
understand if I might be misunderstanding you by asking you for other
examples of theories that you think had this feature--I thought perhaps we
might be understanding the idea of "having to believe the premises in order
to justify the premises" differently, so that you might not actually be
asking people to accept the tenets of your theory on blind faith. But if
there is no misunderstanding, and you are indeed saying there is absolutely
no justification for believing your theory in terms of any preexisting
concepts we might have, then I suppose there is no further need to discuss
this question.
I still have the feeling that this is not quite the case though, since you
are asking for comments/critiques of your theory, but what possible basis
could comments/critiques have unless you believed we all had some shared
standards for judging the merits of the theory? I think if you are able to
figure out what standards you are using to judge the various elements of the
theory, and what standards you expect others to judge it by in order to have
useful comments about it, then if you can articulate these standards you may
be able to give a clearer explanation of why you think it makes sense to
accept your theory. For example, one of these standards may be the "a
theory of everything should have no arbitrary elements" idea, which I think
is shared by a lot of people on this list (I described this as the
'arbitrariness problem' in my post at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2606.html ), and which you call the
"no information" rule.
Jesse
Received on Mon Dec 20 2004 - 22:08:03 PST