My favourite essays are often syncretic: they unify (or partially unify, as in this case) two points of view that are commonly portrayed as opposites or incompatible. Whether someone wants (or wanted) kids or not, there's something in this lovely essay.https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1205892197154988032 …
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My all-time favourite example of syncretic thought: I am told there used to be two opposed schools in biology. Roughly: the Mendelians, who believed genes explained biology, and the Darwinians, who believed evolution by natural selection did.
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It wasn't until the neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 1920s that it was really widely understood and accepted that these two points of view aren't opposed or incompatible, they actually reinforce one another, are part of a syncretic whole.
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(Incidentally, child psychologists use "syncretic thought" in a manner related to, but different from, my meaning here. My meaning derives from religious syncretism, which is about combining two belief systems. I use "syncretic thought" as a private term of art!)
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
Does conventional rationalism not include unifications? (Do they have a Kuhnian bend?)
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Replying to @reasonisfun @michael_nielsen
Well, “conventional rationalism” is a nebulous category… however, in general, theories of rationality don’t cover the process of merging ontologies. Or, more generally, of where ontologies come from and what role they play in rationality (including scientific progress).
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In this case (and others discussed by Kuhn, such as the development of understanding of mixtures vs covalent compounds) the dispute turned on what the relevant ontology was. That’s prior to figuring out what theory is best once you have a workable ontology.
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Generally rationalist theories assume you've got a pile of data, and you are trying to figure out which theory is "best," according to some criterion or other, relative to the data. But there aren't any "data" independent of ontology.
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Major scientific disputes are often about what should count as relevant data and why.
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