Rules of Thumb & General Laws

[rednaliknaj]

Amazingly, there ARE useful generalisations. That is how we manage to get by. Over the years some of these generalisations have been gathered in systems, and at some point in this development people took to calling the result 'science'. No harm in the word, but it did suggest a pretty strange move.

Moving from a useful generalisation, to a general law.

Here is where it gets very, very sticky.

To imagine that our useful generalisations are, so to speak, shadows of some eternal truths, general laws, is a powerful temptation. It is a beautiful idea and one that often helps when we try to make our systems more elegant. But then we reach too far, and start believing things about Objective Reality, about Facts and Evidence and so on and on.

Nothing wrong with that, again, but we omit to change our thinking as we cross the border from what we can experience, and the phantasy land of underlying causes we like to dream about. No one will ever observe a cause, and for the simple reason that what we observe, can only be reported in the indicative mood, whereas causal relationships can only be expressed in the subjunctive mood.

The practical question will always be: is there a useful rule of thumb about this? and How good is it?

And the practical certainly does no exhaust the range of legitimate questions, so long as we don't cheat and try to pass off the answers to our, let's say, spiritual questions, as if they constituted rules of thumb with known and well established credentials.

Religion is pretty useless on its own for fixing a flat tyre, and science is even more useless as a foundation for morality and conscience. But the temptation to confuse these disciplines, is powerful indeed.


Tataa!