On Monday, February 26th at 7:30 our science series will begin at IDEAS. I am super excited about Bill's science hour. Topics:
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WHAT SCIENCE REALLY IS
Week 1. Reality, Knowledge, and Meaning.
Week 2. Science and Common Sense
Week 3. Canards and Conspiracies.
Week 4. Logical Fallacies and Pseudoscience.
Week 5. Flavors of Science.
Week 6. Regulatory Science and Toxicology.
Week 7. When and Why should we believe Science?
Week 1: Reality, Knowledge, and Meaning. I will begin with the arguments of philosophers that Reality is an artificial construct of the human mind, misinformed and distorted by our human senses and intellect. A famous example is Socrates statement that I am the wisest man in Athens because I know one thing. And that is that I know nothing. His point was that we actually know nothing about the real world except for whatever meaning, which is useful to ourselves, that we have constructed out of our own random, individual experiences. These ideas will be illustrated with examples from Art History. The deduction from this view of Reality is that self-deception is an innate, inescapable, and very powerful, human quality.
These beliefs about Reality lead to two questions:
1. Is there an objective Reality independent of the misperceptions and distortions innate to all humans?
2. If there is an objective reality, rather than merely beliefs, how can we know that we have knowledge of it? How do we justify beliefs, such that they become knowledge of reality?
Modern philosophers have proposed three methods (Foundationalism, Coherentism, Reliabilism) for justifying the reality of our beliefs - such that we have knowledge of them as truths rather than self-deception. I will preview a later assertion that Science can be justified according to all three of these methods, and conversely that Pseudoscience can be invalidated by all of them.
Finally, we will compare and contrast how the great Systems of Knowing Art, Religion, Science, and Philosophy assign meaning to human experience.
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$ 20 class fee, max 14 attendees, 6 remaining.
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