John Horgan and James (Jim) McClellan, according to Horgan
in Scientific American on June 1, 2017 —
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Me: "Jim, you're a scholar! Professor! Esteemed historian of science! And yet you don’t really believe science is capable of producing truth." Jim: "Science is stories we tell about nature. And some stories are better than other stories. And you can compare stories to each other on all kinds of grounds, but you have no access to"— he pauses for dramatic effect— "The Truth. Or any mode of knowing outside of your own story-telling capabilities, which include rationality, experiment, explanatory scope and the whole thing. I would love to have some means of making knowledge about the world that would allow us to say, 'This is really it. There really are goddamn electrons.'" He whacks the table. |
See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry and Glitch.
