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Italics Corrected - Sorry

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Posted by Aurino Souza on November 19, 2003 14:29:36 UTC

Harv,
I was enjoying the debate so far, but all of a sudden I see we're not even talking about the same thing!

Firstly, there is no agreement among philosophers on whether certain kind of cognitive thoughts are only possible in the context of language.

There is no agreement among philosophers about anything. For heaven's sake, 12 billion years after the big bang they are still debating whether the world exists or not! One would think there are more important things to do with one's brain.

And for the record, before you bring up the anti-realism thing again, I do not dispute that the world exists.

Physical anthropologists suspect that language played a key role in the development of our brains.

Suspicions, suspicions, suspicions... why base our understanding of things on "suspicions" when the world is so full of facts?

there is reasons to suspect that sophisticated thought requires language of some type in order to properly frame your thoughts into logical sequence.

I didn't say that at all. Not by a million miles!

Why do you need language for science? It's quite simple. You need a language to read Newton's "Principia Mathematica", Einstein's "The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Darwin's "The Evolution of the Species", and just about anything that qualifies as science.

How difficult can that possibly be?

If you cannot frame your thoughts into logical sequence, the experience of an event might be drastically altered - hence the whole caveman thing running from an eclipse.

So the whole science thing is about controlling our fears? That I could certainly agree with!

Chimps are engaging in science when they pick up sticks and thrust them into an ant hill to get ants.

I'm sorry Harv, but I can't comment on that statement without offending you. So I won't.

Crows were found to bend a wire to get certain results.

My computer was found to try a connection to the http server to get certain results. Where does that take us but to the land of nonsense?

I think thought is interdependent with language, the function of thought without language is vastly limited, I think.

So how does a child learn to speak? Without thinking, I must assume?

Science is human thought applied in experimental ways with nature.

I believe you forgot about the monkeys this time...

In that primitive sense, astrology is like science, but since the advent of modern science we have learned ways to avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscience.

Define "pseudoscience", tell me exactly why people often confuse pseudoscience with science, and explain to me how we can tell which portions of modern science are, in fact, pseudoscience.

Too hard? I know, but that's what I've been trying to get at. Unsuccessfully, I might add, as I always end up inside the "anti-realist" box.

the basic motivations of pseudoscience and science are the same.

So what else is the same?

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