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Metaphysical materialism has replaced positivism and pragmatism as the dominant contemporary form of scientism. Since scientism is, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendencies, a critique of its most influential contemporary form is a duty for a philosopher who views his enterprise as more than a purely technical discipline.
Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason, p211
In support of realism there seem to be only those “reasons of the heart” which, as Pascal says, reason does not know. Indeed, I have long felt that belief in realism involves a profound leap of faith, not at all dissimilar from the faith that animates deep religious convictions.
Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game, p116
Reducing science from a possible source of redemptive truth to a model of rational cooperation is the contemporary analogue of the reduction of the Gospels from a recipe for attaining eternal happiness to a compendium of sound moral advice… To give up the idea that there is an intrinsic nature of reality to be discovered either by the priests, or the philosophers, or the scientists, is to disjoin the need for redemption from the search for universal agreement.
Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a transitional genre” p103-4

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.

We philosophers who are accused of not having sufficient respect for objective truth – the ones whom the materialist metaphysicians like to call “postmodern relativists” – think of objectivity as intersubjectivity. So we can happily agree that scientists achieve objective truth in a way that littérateurs do not. But we explain this phenomenon sociologically rather than philosophically – by pointing out that natural scientists are organized into expert cultures in a way that literary intellectuals should not try to organize themselves. You can have an expert culture if you agree on what you want to get, but not if you are wondering what sort of life you ought to desire. We know what purposes scientific theories are supposed to serve. But we are not now, and never will be, in a position to say what purposes novels, poems, and plays are supposed to serve. For such books continually redefine our purposes.
Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a transitional genre” p101
But the scientists still retain the idea that the latest product of the scientific imagination is not merely an improvement on what was previously imagined, but is also closer to the intrinsic nature of things. That is why they found Kuhn’s suggestion that they think of themselves as problem-solvers so insulting. Their rhetoric remains “We have substituted Reality for Appearance!” rather than “We have solved some long-standing problems!” or “We have made it new!
Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a transitional genre” p99
OK, Dawkins is Dawkins, but that subtitle! Really? Truly?

OK, Dawkins is Dawkins, but that subtitle! Really? Truly?

Richard Dawkins has no sense of irony. He rails endlessly against fundamentalists yet he defends old-fashioned, Thomas Gradgrind-style materialism as zealously as the Mid-West Creationists defend the literal truth of Genesis. He accuses others of misrepresentation yet he seriously misrepresents religion. Also, which is irony writ large, he misrepresents science, in whose name he is assumed to speak. He condemns the Catholics for filling the heads of children with a particular view of life before they have had a chance to think for themselves – and now, in The Magic of Reality, written for readers as young as nine, he has done precisely that.”

An international team of scientists at CERN has just announced that they’ve recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light.

It has been sufficiently demonstrated that the language of theoretical science is irreducibly metaphorical and unformalizable, and that the logic of science is circular interpretation, reinterpretation, and self-correction of data in terms of theory, theory in terms of data.
Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, p173

“The flare is in fact a high-energy jet of radiation produced by a star falling into a black hole at the center of a galaxy 4 billion light-years away.”

For decades, researchers have been putting general relativity to the test. The theory has held up so far, but any deviation from expectations, however small, could point to an overhaul of physics.

The question is very simple: do matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics? That’s a very simple question, but a very profound one.

At the heart of the experiment is one of the weirdest, and most important, tenets of quantum mechanics: the principle that empty space is anything but. Quantum theory predicts that a vacuum is actually a writhing foam of particles flitting in and out of existence.

Although equal quantities of matter and antimatter are thought to have been created in the Big Bang, we see almost no antimatter in today’s Universe. This asymmetry not only implies a cosmic favouritism for matter, but also suggests that physics does not always work the same way when time is run backwards instead of forwards.