[From Bruce Gregory (990410.1736 EDT)]
Bill Powers (990410.1237 MDT)
In psychology, where mathematics and simulation play vanishingly small
roles, reasoning depends heavily on informal methods and intuition. If you
get a feeling of understanding something, of seeing a pattern or
grasping a
causal relationship, that is assumed to be an "insight," and to be correct
just because you got such a feeling of rightness from it. The problem is
that this feeling of rightness has no understandable foundation.
If someone
else doesn't get it, you can't transmit it to the other person. It is
purely subjective, and it occurs, or fails to occur, for reasons
nobody can
spell out. The people who get the same feeling of rightness about
some idea
band together and form a school of thought, but at bottom they can't
justify themselves any more than a religious cult can. People who get a
feeling of rightness about a different idea simply start a different cult.
I agree completely. You have also described the received view as to the
nature of education (even science education).
Bruce Gregory