Quote:
Originally Posted by filtherton
I believe that there was an invisible dragon in Carl Sagan's hair.
500 years ago, "The Dragon in My Garage" would have applied to any number of assertions that we presently accept as scientific fact, probably including nearly all of the assertions Sagan explained in his Cosmos series.
It is a parable about believing in things without "evidence." But everybody believes in things without "evidence". Even scientists. Anyone who currently believes in a unified field theory, or string theory, or any particular school of economic thought believes in things without "evidence".
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I don't know whether Carl Sagan was a logical positivist or not.
But this parable can just as easily be read as a pragmatic text (and I mean pragmatic not in the every day sense of the word, but in the sense of Peirce-Latour-Habermas).
As such, no assumption about the progress of science is necessary, and no assumption about the existence of an objective truth. And so the point is not that one shouldnt believe that there is a dragon in the garage or not, but that such discussion is useless as it doesn't help understand or explain any relevant phenomena.
---------- Post added at 08:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:33 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by filtherton
I choose to have confidence when that confidence is justified. The lack of credible evidence supporting the existence of ghosts says nothing about whether they exist. Now, if someone were to demonstrate credible evidence that ghosts don't exist, well, that would be a different story.
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Isn't that precisely what Sagan used to say?