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INNUMERACY: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its ConsequencesThe philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine goes even further and maintains that experience never forces one to reject any particular belief. He views science as an integrated web of interconnecting hypotheses, procedures, and formalisms, and argues that any impact of the world on the web can be distributed in many different ways. If we're willing to make drastic enough changes in the rest of the web of our beliefs, the argument goes, we can hold to our belief in the efficacy of the above diet, or indeed in the validity of any pseudoscience. Less controversial is the contention that there are no clear-cut, easy algorithms that allow us to distinguish science from pseudoscience in all cases. The boundary between them is too fuzzy. Our unifying topics, number and probability, do, however, provide the basis for statistics, which, together with logic, constitutes the foundation of the scientific method, which will eventually sort matters out if anything can. However, just as the existence of pink does not undermine the distinction between red and white, and dawn doesn't indicate that day and night are really the same, this problematic fringe area, Quinian arguments notwithstanding, doesn't negate the fundamental differences between science and its impostors ...» |
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