Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A Journalist Gets it Right

Ann Coulter has succeeded where others have routinely failed—in a sentence she has cut to the core of the origins debate:

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

Right or wrong, Intelligent design is an appeal to the evidence. And right or wrong, evolution is an appeal to the convictions. Once again it is empiricism versus rationalism—another round of an age-old debate.

That debate doesn’t progress very far when pundits from George Will to Chris Matthews don’t even understand what it is about. Kudos to one journalist for getting it right.

11 comments:

  1. Ann Coulter? Gets it right? Good one, Cornelius.

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  2. Ann Coulter?

    Gets science right??

    hahahahaha!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

    Cornelius, you crack me up!

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  3. From a review in Amazon.com:

    "The logic Coulter employs in "Godless" is impeccable. Liberals, she proclaims, detest science. They ignore the empirically observable truth that God fashioned Eve from Adam's rib while they promote superstitious Darwinism. They deny the science supporting the use of adult stem cells to cure disease because "Liberals just want to kill humans." How can you argue with that?"

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  4. Ann Coulter is not a journalist, but a self-described polemicist.

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  5. Ann Coulter: Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

    Actually, 'Darwinists' go and discover new evidence. IDers are just polemicists.

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  6. CH: Once again it is empiricism versus rationalism—another round of an age-old debate.

    Actually, once again, I'd suggest this appears to be naive logical empiricism vs. scientific realism.

    From the Stanford online Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Scientific Realism

    Semantically, realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world. In common parlance, realists take theoretical statements at “face value”. According to realism, claims about scientific entities, processes, properties, and relations, whether they be observable or unobservable, should be construed literally as having truth values, whether true or false. This semantic commitment contrasts primarily with those of so-called instrumentalist epistemologies of science, which interpret descriptions of unobservables simply as instruments for the prediction of observable phenomena, or for systematizing observation reports.

    and...

    In the historical development of realism, arguably the most important strains of antirealism have been varieties of empiricism which, given their emphasis on experience as a source and subject matter of knowledge, are naturally set against the idea of knowledge of unobservables […] In the first half of the twentieth century […] empiricism came predominantly in the form of varieties of “instrumentalism”: the view that theories are merely instruments for predicting observable phenomena or systematizing observation reports..

    So, would you say you're a logical empiricist or a constructive empiricist, which is based on Van Fraassen's 1980 reinvention of empiricism? Again, from the Stanford online Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry…

    Crucially, unlike traditional instrumentalism and logical empiricism, constructive empiricism interprets theories in precisely the same manner as realism. The antirealism of the position is due entirely to its epistemology—it recommends belief in our best theories only insofar as they describe observable phenomena, and an agnostic attitude with respect to anything unobservable. The constructive empiricist thus recognizes claims about unobservables as true or false, but does not go so far as to believe or disbelieve them. In advocating a restriction of belief to the domain of the observable, the position is similar to traditional instrumentalism, and is for this reason sometimes described as a form of instrumentalism.

    Of course, a full disclosure of your position doesn't seem to suite your agenda, so I won't be holding my breath.

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  7. Ann Coulter, huh? ANN COULTER??

    I've seen lots of shenanigans on this blog, but this one takes the cake. Cornelius has officially jumped the shark.

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  8. Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories...

    Theories such as... ???

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  9. Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

    I might be getting this wrong, but isn't Cornelius always complaining that evolution as a theory is constantly changing as new evidence is brought out. It seems to me that this is what Coulter claims that IDists do. And still, Cornelius claims that she gets it right. Help me out here.

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  10. ann coulter is a lunatic.

    Cornelius, you do realize, don't you, that even IF the ToE were wrong, that doesn't automatically make whatever you believe right?

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