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| Words about words |
I don't mean mental, I mean perceptive:
"How curious, after all, is the way which we moderns think about our world! And it in is all so novel, too. The cosmology underlying our mental processes is but three centuries old a mere infant in the history--- and yet we cling to it with the same embarrassed zeal with which a young father fondles his new-born baby. Like him, we are ignorant enough of its precise nature; like him, we nevertheless take it piously to be ours and allow it a subtly pervasive and unhindered control over our thinking."
...
"Doubtless it is no mystery why, amid all the genetic studies entered upon with such confidence today, the precise nature and assumptions of modern scientific thinking itself have not as yet been made the object of really disinterested, critical research."
(The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 1-2, emphasis added; cf. Edwin A. Burtt). [Consider the hypothesis that "Metaphorical awareness" helps us to isolate metaphysical concepts.]
Here is a list of words relative to the quote from Burtt's book: homolog, homologous, phenotype, metaphorical, metaphor, metaphysics, cosmology.
Concerning the focus set forth in the above quote from Burtt's book, the picture I see is touched upon in the Dredd Blog series: The Doll As Metaphor, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
I have argued and am arguing that good nomenclature is a fundamental necessity of good science (Good Nomenclature: A Matter of Life and Death - 2), and have done so in the context of both cosmology and genetics.
Honesty is a major part of the foundation of knowledge, it's main pillar is "we don't know a lot of stuff" (see second video below).
It is a public service of Dredd Blog.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.