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Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont think that the arguments re. "fact" are the way to go about dismissing id.
uh---facts are universal and infallible?
depends what you have defined as relevant yes?
here's a demonstration---but sadly, i can't find a graphic for this, and it is really good...ugh...-----anyway, on 1+1=2: that the statement is true depends on what you are counting.
josef albers worked out a neat demonstration for the claim 1+1=3 or more. the demonstration (along with albers quite lovely visuals) can be found in edward tufte's "envisioning information" p. 61 or in albers "search versus re-search" pp. 17-18.
the following is not as good, but it uses what i could find online....so maybe you can derive it from this:
you add one black line to another black line on a white surface...
if you add the two lines by placing them one across the other, 1+1=4 or more.
so an even apparently self-evident claim (1+1=2) is a function of rules that you bring to bear on the operation, and these rules are frame-contingent.
it is because "facts" are frame contingent that it matters so much which frames are brought into play.
this is not a relativist argument, btw. think about it. |
While an interesting tangent, we humans have the ability to reason, and use what common sense we have to place things into a perspective of likelyhood. It is (in my opinion) this ability that has allowed us as a species to progress beyond tool making monkeys in the first place. The sciences are a wonderful example of this tendency to be rational in action, as they place observation and reproduction of results as a prerequisite to reasonable Data.
The above experiment can certainly be true if one decides to set the parameters in such a way to create the results they are hoping for, just as ID can be true under these circumstances. True scientific evaluation of a thing however, requires one to ignore artificial criteria, and focus on the rational explanations that Data point to.