Hmm, Saying that Objectivist are tainted by Objectivism is self defeating... seems to me that being 'Objective' is to just see what is 'There', what is present, what is the process or the cause; and not tainting that process or observation with prior knowledge, theories or concepts. Being able to do this is what I and Mark Hamilton call: Wide Scope Accountability. [I give it a proper definition in my book] Once one articulates only what has been observed it may be necessary to use the metaphors of other concepts to get others to understand but those metaphors are not what was observed.

The philosophy of science is dominated by the problem of induction (I posted a book review of David Harriman’s book on this point – excellent read). Karl Popper provided his pseudo solution, which was that science gropes toward better approximations and that the difference between science and non-science is that a scientific is falsifiable. However, science never provides us with real knowledge.

This paper (Why the Ultimate Argument for Scientific Realism Ultimately Fails) is about Epistemic Scientific Realism and the no-miracles argument for ESR. The NMA is explained as no-miracles argument’, after Putnam's (1975, p. 73) claim that realism ‘is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Mizrahi is arguing against the NMA as justification for ESR. From my reading about scientific realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy it appears that ESR attempts to solve the problem of induction with this idea that we infer to the best (closest fit) answer. I would consider this just Karl Popper updated although I think philosophers who pursue this area would argue that they are just describing what scientists actually do.

In my opinion a lot of the non-sense in this area is the result of defining knowledge as essentially omniscience or perfect knowledge. I would define knowledge as information and concepts that explain reality. As a result, knowledge is always contextual. For instance, it is not wrong or shows a lack of knowledge to assume the Earth is flat if I am building a standard house. If you don’t get this guy to agree that knowledge is not omniscience (perfect knowledge) you will never have a useful discussion with him.
Second of all you will have to get him to agree that A is A and that A is knowable. Most likely this guy is a Platonist of one sort or another where at best we see the world through a fog. If the law of identity holds and we can trust our senses (again this does not mean they are infallible – that would violate the law of identity) then induction reasoning is perfectly valid. Identity implies causation and causation means that we can trust our senses. It also means there is only one reality (I call this the uniqueness theorem) and therefore there is a correct description of reality, however that description is always contextual since knowledge is contextual.

My guess is that this guy believes he is a friend of science and his approach is to describe/observe what scientists actually do. Probably the best thing you could do is give him a copy of David Harriman’s book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Leap-In.... Then discuss these issues in the context of this book. Anything else is likely to be frustrating. Although he might be willing to interview about what you do under the idea that he is gathering information on how science really works.

Hello, J,

Thank you for posting this and starting the discussion. This set of comments is much more interesting to me than the usual venting of helpless outrage at politicians or numerous attempts to prove Ayn Rand wrong in denying the existence of gods.

Again, thank you very much.

P.S. Did you notice that there is not a single ad hominem in these comments?

Much of the confusion about objective reality stems from a failure to distinguish between what something is and what something does. Scientific experimentation and observation provide a metric for what something does, as such these are measures of behavior. We can speculate as to what the underlying mechanism might be to produce such behavior and we can perform additional tests to see if our model of that mechanism produces observable results. In this way underlying reality can be thought of as the contents of a box that exhibits certain observable properties. It is the box that we see and not its contents. We can develop a "theory of the enclosure" but if we cannot open the box the true mechanism will remain unknown.

I've heard of Mizrahi, but know nothing of him. However, just the titles of his works were a learning experience. I hope you can get to him for a talk and best of all, a post to this forum. I'd pay to read (hear) that.

FIT - my first thought was Fashion Institute of
Technology in New York City! Boy, what a
stretch!

Why debate such a person. He is into deliberately obtuse principles that only befit a modern university professor (translation- useless). Makes me think colleges today are worthless

I do not know the university you are associated with but they made a mistake in hiring this fellow. When all is said and done there will still be one philosophy that is worth living by "Objectivism".
From what I read of this fellow it is mere gibberish. You should direct him to The Objectivist web site that was posted yesterday. Maybe he will have the capacity to learn.

The article about god illustrates my points. Mizrah attacks the argument for the existence of god because of Jewish survival. He is right the argument is poor, but he uses this best explanation (IBE) test, which is update Karl Popper. So this article confirms my thoughts in about the first paper.

2nd Question: At some point this idea relies on the idea that there is not an objective reality (subjectivism). Of course we interpret the world based on what we know. The most interesting points in science happen when we find out that the experiment does not comport with these concepts. For instance, when we find out that a feather falls as fast as a lead ball in a vacuum, but that was not what we expected, then we have learned something important.

I may upset some of our philosophy profs, but I think if you are going to call yourself an expert in the philosophy of science you ought to at least have an undergraduate degree in a hard science or engineering.

He appears to make the same mistake as Popper and many others. His definition of knowledge is Omniscience. I will take a look at this in more detail over the weekend.