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