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- Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!relay.philips.nl!prle!hpas5!schiller
- From: schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c)
- Subject: Re: Which theory before observation ?
- Message-ID: <schiller.726741489@hpas5>
- Sender: news@prl.philips.nl (USENET News System)
- Organization: Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, Netherlands
- References: <C0HLqI.LA@unx.sas.com> <schiller.726487694@hpas5> <C0Jw8r.838.1@cs.cmu.edu> <1993Jan9.161851.28603@psych.toronto.edu>
- Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 08:38:09 GMT
- Lines: 23
-
- christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
-
- >>In article <schiller.726487694@hpas5> schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c) writes:
- >>>My position as a scientist is that facts, i.e. the results of observation,
- >>>are the basis of theories. There are no "well-known" flaws of this position.
- >>>
- >I'm afriad that this is simply ill-informed. The observation-theory distinction
- >has long been a matter a controversy in philosophy of science. The best-known
- >"flaws" are put forward in Putnam's "What theories are not." The position
- >outlined there is a little technical, but the central example is that one
- >cannot establish, through obsevation, that a thing is red unless one has
- >a conceptual scheme for colors that includes red in advance.
-
- You are right: one needs a concept of red. But a concept and a theory
- are two different things. Red is a concept formed by children
- before they are six months old, and it gives a name to certain class
- of colours. When a child says: "it is red", it just says, "it has a similar
- look than all the previous things I have observed, which I call red".
- The statement "It is red" therefore just compares different observations.
- Not much of theory there.
-
- Christoph Schiller
-
-