Sublime

The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably light-waves. Matter no longer has the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not unchanging substance, but merely a way of gr

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth.

Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover. Discovery comes not when something goes right but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected. In short, what appears to be an anomaly. The a in anomaly is the a that means ‘not’, as in ‘amoral’ or

Thomas Samuel Kuhn, qui a élaboré la notion de paradigme : des découvertes scientifiques universellement reconnues qui, pour un temps, fournissent à la communauté scientifique des problèmes types et des solutions, jusqu’à ce qu’un nouveau paradigme vienne apporter un cadre théorique neuf et des conceptions nouvelles.

when the theory can’t explain observations, then it needs refinement or revision.

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.

The very critical thinking that Bacon and Descartes unleashed has shown that observation requires a vast, preexisting conceptual structure, and even reason’s most obvious assumptions (Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas”) can be mistaken.

We have some idea what we mean by this concept, but no good, precise definition as yet. (Even if we had one, it would be impossible to conduct the study using records from current students, because that variable could not be assessed until at least 20 years after the students had completed their doctoral work.)”