[Avery Andrews 951202]
I won't try to judge whether Dag is right or wrong about his specific
evaluation of EAB, but I would agree with his basic point that there
is more to science vs. non-science than the `best practice' of the
times. There's a lot to be said that various Europoean cultures
collected figured out something very important a few hundred years
ago about how to acquire knowledge, which gave them an immense edge
over their competitors. E.g. the Australian Aboriginals had managed
to hold their continent against the surrounding Austronesion groups
for thousands of years, but were almost effortlessly crushed by the
inhabitants of a modest-sized island on the other side of the world.
And the name of science can be applied to approaches that are not
scientific at all, the most horrible and grotesque example to date
being Marxism (if you start with the intention of changing the world
rather than understanding it, the rest is inevitiable, I suspect).
One of my suspicions about the nature of science is that one crucial
ingredient is an overriding interest in some actually corner of the
world, be it frogs, the noises that come out of peoples mouths when
they talk or whatever. This makes me a bit suspicious when PCT-ers
claim to be interested in nothing but the `phenomenon of control',
because I wonder if that's enough to get you through all the stuff
that has to be dealt with before you can demonstrate anything
substantial about control systems in, say, frogs, but who knows.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au