A Quote by Jerry Fodor
...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds.
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What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.
I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.
The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behaviorlacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.
There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.
Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
I have a natural curiosity about things, in general. I'm constantly trying to find out how things work and how I can put them back together again, and why they work that way. The natural world is all around us.
We both [with Jo Andres] think that it is really important to our culture that we support all kinds of music, all kinds of theatre and all kinds of art because you never know what moves people. We've always believed that there should be a strong voice outside the commercial world. Certainly, the commercial world has a huge place in our culture and we also support that - but, we also want to support the stuff that lives outside of that.
I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?
My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.
The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich vareity of the world.
Natural Magick is taken to be nothing else, but the chief power of all the natural Sciences; which therefore they call the top and perfection of Natural Philosophy, and which is indeed the active part of the same; which by the assistance of natural forces and faculties, through their mutual & opportune application, performs those things that are above Human Reason.
There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.
There is almost no evidence that diagnoses such as 'schizophrenia' and 'bipolar disorder' correspond to discrete entities ('natural kinds' in the language of philosophy).
I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.
World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there's all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
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