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You seem to be arguing different things in every comment. As I understand it, your thesis now is that most scientists most of the time accept things they hear
by gjm11 7y ago
You seem to be arguing different things in every comment.
As I understand it, your thesis now is that most scientists most of the time accept things they hear from other scientists. That's probably true. And it's part of how science works -- which it does, rather impressively on the whole. But the paradigm-shifting stuff is also part of science, and a vital part at that, so if this is meant to connect somehow to your earlier remarks about science being passive, "scientism" being passive-aggressive, and "intuition" being assertive, you have more work to do to justify that connection.
(And, once again, if you want to claim some sort of superiority for "intuition", you need to show not only that intuition purports to assert things more definitely than science does, but also that it does so correctly. Mere overconfidence is not an intellectual virtue.)
Thomas Hobbes was a smart guy. But when he tried to do science and mathematics, the results were not good. The most infamous example: He thought he'd accomplished the so-called squaring of the circle and duplication of the cube. He hadn't. (They are impossible.) So far as I can tell, none of Hobbes's scientific work turned out to have any lasting value.