At 10:29 AM 6/15/2008, Mohammad Gani wrote:

>
>A new paradigm must seem arrogant to the 
>adherents of the old paradigm. For example, the 
>pre-Copernican world accepted the idea that if a 
>statement is universally confirmed by 
>experience, than that statement is true. Thus if 
>everybody sees that the earth is lying still, 
>then the statement ?the earth is lying still? is true.

But the statement is true, is true today, and is 
true according to the most advanced physics. It 
is merely that the domain of the truth is limited 
to the surface of the earth. It is not 
superstition; it is science. I personally know 
this to be true, because I used to be a surveyor 
and I have taken sun shots. I can assure you that 
the sun moves, and moves particularly fast 
through a 20x theodolite. The question here is 
not the "truth," but the domain of a particular 
truth. By the same scientific instruments and 
mathematics, the Earth is flat, because I have 
surveyed hundreds of acres and closed to within a 
centimeter using only plane geometry and making 
no corrections for curvature. This seems to meet 
your requirements for the truth, mathematics and 
logic. Now, as I survey towards the horizon, I 
will have to make a correction for curvature, so 
the flat earth truth is limited to a few 
kilometers from where I happen to be standing, 
but it is true enough for any documents I have 
ever filed with the records office.

>  But Copernicus challenges this belief. To him, 
> even if everybody confirms an experience, it is 
> not a basis of truth, because everybody is 
> subject to illusion. The earth is not still, 
> but they all see it to be still in universal 
> error of observation. To arrive at the truth, 
> one must resort to valid mathematics and logic to explain the facts.

This is simply not true. You did not address my 
objections to logic as the final arbiter, and now 
you add mathematics. But math deals only with 
number and extension, only with quantitate 
aspects. Are there no qualitative aspects to 
reality? Pac? Descartes, I do not believe that 
even physical reality is only extension and number.


>Dear John, by a supreme paradox, I have 
>discovered the obvious that was always ignored. 
>I begin with the statement: the buyer pays the seller,

In a barter economy, it is not clear who is the 
buyer and who the seller. But even in a money 
economy, is not one party buying money and the 
other buying a commodity? This seems obvious.

Your students may be right and your colleagues 
wrong. I am not familiar enough with your work to 
make any comment. Nevertheless, when one person 
sees as "obvious" what nobody else sees, there is 
reason to doubt their observations. Maybe you 
ought to try to understand why it is your 
colleagues cannot see what you see, and not put it down to superstition.

You have taken Kuhn to heart, but Kuhn emphasizes 
the discontinuities in knowledge. I have my 
doubts. Copernicus is not possible without 
Ptolemy, nor Newton without Kepler. Einstein 
built on a body of work which had already done most of the work.


John C. M?daille