michael_nielsen

When quantum arrived, the logical positivists strove valiantly to incorporate it into their new rationalism. They didn’t get far, and the attempt was overwhelmed as new blows to rationalism kept coming. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was the next most influential culturally.

Logical positivism was the last serious attempt to rescue rationalism. All subsequent rationalisms have been unserious, in the sense that they don’t even try to address the well-known problems that wrecked the logical positivist program.

Science still works, some of the time, of course. Rationality is still better than irrationality. Why? Stubborn clinging to the wreck of rationalism renders asking that question impossible—much less answering it.

We’re still floundering in the storm of postmodern irrationalism, announced by the NYT 100 years ago today. We can do better. We can rebuild the flotsam of a broken modernity into new, sea-worthy watercraft.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1193573460103946240 …

Follow-up to this thread. Several replies objected that relativity couldn’t have been a shock, because science consists of replacing incomplete approximate theories with successively better ones. >

This is not at all how science was understood in 1900. Science in those days found absolute, eternal, exact Truths. The “successively better theories” story, taught in high school now, was invented in the 20th century precisely to account for relativity and quantum.