Random reminder

Press, 31 January 1983, Page 24

Random reminder

ALL IN THE MIND YOU KNOW

New Readers Start Here. The Rational Party and the Empiricist Free Traders are quarrelling about why is a duck when it spins. This is known as scientific realism. To join either side you have to believe that the Universe exists, and much else. NOW READ ON. An Empiricist: One can only assume this or that to be true for as long as it is useful to do so. Are Newton's laws still "true"? A Rationalist: On no. There is a True Truth. We can know it if we try. It is called Scientific Realism. E: Says who? R: A writer in the September issue of “HUMANIST." E: Surely necessary truth derives its validity from the way we define or use words'and hence must be a subjective thing? R: You can’t fool me into accepting that. The Universe exists, doesn't it? Objectively? E: It depends what you mean by . .. R: You must come to see that the definitional involvement in necessary truth is really only a matter of coincidence and not at all a sign of its fundamental nature. E: Who said THAT? Never mind. Page 4. Carry on. R: It is true, and necessarily true, that

the Universe exists, because if you claim that there is NO reason and NO explanation you are left in interminable doubt. E: We can't have that, can we. R: But when you give up struggling against the Rationalist position . . . E: (aside; Mix this with a bit of grass and you’ve got a new religion. R: Give up struggling. I say. and accept the Final Truth, once you have put the facts of experience together. Necessity replaces chance. To know and Understand the Universe is simply a matter of effort and deduction. E: (Does not speak. An aircraft plummets out of the sky. missing them both but demolishing a kindergarten 200 metres away.) R: The poor Empiricists that built that kindergarten in their ignorance and folly, for example. If only they studied what we epistemologists call the theory of knowledge under philosophers like me. they would have built the kindergarten 200 metres this way. It is all quite clear to . . . (The sentence is not finished, on account of the fluttering to earth of subsidiary fragments of aircraft, one of which takes the speaker off at the neck.) MORAL, as observed by Empirical Humanists: God is watching. She is black.