You’re all heart and in the education business too, Socrates?
Socrates said: "the only true knowledge is knowing that you don’t know anything.
I think with respect, Lekatt, that this is not a very helpful summary of Socrates’ position with regard to knowledge (or science). Its cliché-like tone will put a lot of people off (indeed I always found “I know how little I know”, or the stronger form as expressed by you, to be rather trite and almost totally unhelpful). No offence meant, but when you’re arguing with smart people, you need to use only the best weapons, be they arguments or questions.
And so we come on to questions. It was for continuously asking questions that Socrates (the real Socrates, not the Plato-Socrates of later works such as The Republic) was marked out from his contemporaries. As Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: Plato, p. 128) writes, ‘Socrates was a moralist and an enthusiast’, which is indeed interesting, since I would describe myself and my motivation in much the same way. (So, yes, David, maybe I’m a latterday very-much-poor-man’s Socrates; or a Socrates wannabe, at any rate.)
Interestingly, Socrates was sceptical of all professional learnedness, whether the great philosophers of the past (now, of course, not considered anything near as great as him) or the learned men of his own generation. His watchword “How little do I know!” was important because this was for him the true scientific spirit. It was those who did not know this (i.e. how little they knew - not that they knew nothing, which is absurd when you think about it) that he claimed knew nothing at all.
Socrates believed that men of learning (what we would call scientists today) should not be judged by the amount of knowledge they had stored up; his belief was that a good indication of a man’s scientific level as well as of his intellectual honesty could be given by his awareness of what he did not know.
Back to David’s other point, ‘the true teacher can prove himself only by exhibiting that self-criticism which the uneducated lacks’ (OSEI, p. 130). So we come back to our awareness of how little we know as an indicator of our intellectual devleopment, our wisdom, if you like. Socrates’ focus was on the awareness of our limitations; ‘the teacher’s authority [is] founded solely on his consciousness of his own limitations’ (ibid).
Socrates saw his mission as to stir people up from their dogmatic slumber. (What, I wonder, would he have made of PC and what I call ‘the abolition of thinking’ (hive mentality, ‘alliances’ between interested groupings) today?) The educational mission carried over into a broader ethico-political mission. Popper (ibid) again: ‘[Socrates] felt that the way to improve the political life of the city was to educate the citizens to self-criticism. In this sense he claimed to be “the only politician of his day”, in opposition to those others who flatter the people instead of furthering their true interests.’
Three further related points. First, Socrates/Popper was careful to stress that education should not be viewed as the responsibility of the state. As Popper puts it with customary pointedness, it is important that ‘the dubious authority of the expert’ (op cit p. 131) not be backed by the dubious authority of the state. By teaching science as an authoritative doctrine, science is ruined. Further, this way leads to the destruction of ‘the scientific spirit of inquiry’ (my emphasis - David’s ‘heart’?), that is, ‘the spirit of the search for truth, as opposed to the belief in its possession’ (ibid).
Second, (a point I made earlier in passing which has exercised my mind quite a bit recently), we need to broaden our thinking to recognise (following Hayek, MacIntyre et al) the rationality of tradition, and even the rationality of passions and emotions, in addition to the rationality of scientific argument. In other words, we need a theory of the moral sense.
Third, beware of false Socrateses! As Popper (ibid) warns us (writing of the “Socrates” of The Republic - described by Popper as ‘the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism’): ‘Even his self-deprecating remarks are not based upon awareness of his limitations, but are rather an ironical way of asserting his superiority.’
He who knows has his nose inside out - Sherman
Nope. Socrates was in conflict with the teachers of the day–particularly those who taught the methodology of learning to argue all sides of a question for the (fun and) profit of the argument, itself. It is unfortunate for your position that Socrates died prior to the scientific inquiries of Euclid, Erastosthenes, or Ptolemy, and others. However, lacking an actual scientific inquiry for Socrates to critique, you have no legitimate way to make the claim that you have. Socrates argued against those who were making moral and ethical claims about the world in an absence of scientific inquiry and any attempt to pretend that he would have spoken out against scientific inquiry (or even the published results of such inquiries) is both anachronisitc and selfserving.
Agreed. And thanks for correcting me. Socrates was taking on the philosophers of the past and the ‘learned men’ of his own day, i.e. the Sophists.
However, as stated, he was sceptical of all professional learnedness, and I think he would have concerns about some of the practices and ethoses in academe today.
You come out with this line whenever it’s pointed out that you’re not arguing this issue well. And frankly, it’s beginning to make you look a little bit like a one-trick pony at this point - at least on this issue, where you seem to only have one thing to say.
The question is of course whether you’re actually raising useful, important questions - which depends on their raising real issues, ones that have the potential to expand human knowledge. Asking malformed questions doesn’t really help advance anyone’s knowledge; questioning matters and developing skepticism is valuable, but there’s a difference between skepticism and outright denial.
It’s not that I can’t tolerate people’s doubts on the subject; I’m quite convinced of the validity of the theory of natural selection, but I don’t have the sort of religious fervor that makes me upset if others doubt it. But I don’t think that creating false doubts in people is helpful, and I think that truly questioning the topic requires an understanding of it. You can’t spot flaws in the theory, or raise meaningful questions to contradict it, if you don’t understand it well enough to see what it’s actually claiming and find the real areas in which it may not be satisfactory.
I think the questions you raise have mostly been ones that cast general doubt upon the validity of science - which is not necessarily wrong per se but it doesn’t do much to address the real underlying question of whether the theory is or is not valid. If you doubt it, please explain why. It’s arrogant to cast yourself as the teacher who will guide others to a deeper understanding of the matter, and it’s unrealistic to suppose that those people - if any exist - who find your questions insightful will take more time to understand the matter than you have. Asking the sort of questions you have asked would be the equivalent of criticizing Van Gogh by demanding to know why he painted the sky green in Starry Night. It wouldn’t raise any real issues to do so (since, obviously, he did no such thing) and it does no good to discourage blind obedience to authority if the alternative is a blind refusal to try to understand what one is denying. I understand that you don’t see why your questions aren’t valid, but I think if you examined the responses carefully and read more about the subject, you’d see what the rest of us do. I would just rather see the issue questioned on rational grounds, since only real questioning will find the problems in it.
The problem is that people so rarely honestly apply this notion to themselves (though it is, as you say above, repeated to the point of being a cliché) - people repeat the wisdom of recognizing the limitations of their knowledge, but they only apply it to others. No one thinks to question the limits of their own knowledge.
Philosophy is not terribly interesting to me, and I admit my own knowledge of it is limited. So I can’t judge whether or not you apply it properly when you reference philosophical principles. But I can clearly see efforts to avoid the question. Opening a philosophical inquiry into the limits of knowledge in the middle of a discussion of a complex, concrete issue only obscures the debate, because it substitutes larger, unanswerable questions for smaller but answerable ones.
And since you don’t seem to understand the subject, and don’t seem to wish to offer an alternative, you’re not really questioning anything. You’re just denying it, and that’s perhaps the easiest but the least fruitful way to look at it. Not putting forth an argument means that the actual back-and-forth that debate offers as a way to examine issues cannot occur.
By the way, roger, you asked earlier why humans have stopped evolving. People discussed the reduced role of natural selection on humans nowadays, but that is probably the case. People are far less likely to die young, especially in developed societies, due to the small differences in fitness that would mean death for most critters.
But there’s no evidence that people have stopped evolving at all. The only thing that’s needed to lead to evolution is for some critters to be more likely to reproduce than others. Nowadays, people in the first world are having so few children that in a few countries, populations are declining, and the U.S. only maintains population growth through immigration. Which means that largely, the human population is tilting more in the direction of the developing world (which suggests that we may be turning darker in skin tone, among other things.) Exactly what this means about the direction we’re moving in is impossible to guess. But just because folks are less likely to die doesn’t mean that every population reproduces at the same rate. If some folks are reproducing and some aren’t, it’s easy to see that the first group is going to overwhelm the second if conditions don’t change.
The practices of Academia, however, are different from the workings of science, even if the two share some number of practitioners. Science throughout the world continues to be self-correcting and open to challenge even when specific individuals that practice in Academia may have chosen to close their personal opinions.
(Aside to Stranger On A Train):
A borough is a district within a city.
A burro is an ass.
A burrow is a hole in the ground.
As a Doper, you are expected to know the difference.
The brain commands, the fingers rebel. What are you going to do? 
Stranger
Religious fervour typically operates not to make the adherent upset if others doubt ideas he holds dear, but to fortify his own evangelical zeal, and in some cases proselytising. As the physicist J.D. Bernal (quoted in Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery 1991, 107) wrote, commenting on the evangelical character of many evolutionists in the Darwinian controversy: ‘it was not … that science had to fight an external enemy, the Church; it was that the Church … was within the scientists themselves.’
This need not be the case for those who hold a generally optimistic view of rational criticism and human beings’ capacity to change. Regarding change, though, Popper’s (Myth of the Framework, 1994, 44) advice that ‘no change in one’s position should be made surreptitiously, but it should always be stressed and its consequences explored’ holds good for all those who aim to clarify the matter at hand rather than to merely win the argument.
Not to worry. My own PhD is in linguistics, in particular, critical discourse analysis, which is strongly influenced by poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, sometimes referred to as “postphilosophers”. Foucault’s teleological explanations have been criticised as not qualifying as genuine causal analysis, but rather assuming causes without demonstrating any causal mechanism, resulting in circular arguments.
No, you can only conclude that the universe is either open and flat or turtle free. 
Which got me somewhat off the thrust of assessing Lobsang’s argument: that once you postulate a non-divine intelligent designer tinkering with Earth life, itself the product of another n.-d.i.d. and so on back to a designer which really did evolve all the way from non-intelligent primæval soup, you might as well argue that the themselves-tinkered-with designers go all the way back to infinity, or that there aren’t any of them in the first place. Otherwise you’re cutting off the turtle stack at an arbitrary point.
Of course, it’s possible that Lobsang was being facetious. 
rog, read this thread thoroughly again and you’ll see the problem. You flit from accusations of guessing to sealions to Socrates without ever giving any indication that you are listening to the direct and experimentally referenced responses others put in time and effort to make.
What is the point of debating someone who simply refuses to accept any premises whatsoever, even undeniable facts such as that humans, dinosaurs ad trilobites did not live together. The existence of humans before a mere few million years ago has been falsified as utterly as Popper could ever demand, and yet you still do not accept the truth of evolution, that species are replaced by previously nonexistent species.
Do you, still? Come one rog, be a man. If you’ve changed your mind, tell us.
Does anybody else think Finchy is sitting back and watching where this thread goes rather than piping in and setting it back on track? Or is that asking too much restraint from a poster who has never before been able to resist the bait David dangled before him?
Parsimony baby, it’s not just good on toast. 
But thanks for the correction of my logic, I was about to chuck the whole thing, since I know that turtles exist.
Since this thread began in one of the “low-rent districts”, I’ll start out with my low-rent response to those wondering “whassup?”. Yeah, things were pretty miserable for a while, then things started looking up. And now…they don’t look so “up”. Apparently two dates was sufficient, and responding to a subsequent e-mail or returning a phone call is too much to ask of some people. I am beginning to think the problem is simply that the Universe hates me. Or maybe it’s just God… Nevertheless, I trudge on.
As for the direction this thread has taken…my heart just isn’t in it for the nonce (“Pathetic”, indeed!). Besides, folks seem to be doing just fine without my input, and anything I say at this point would simply be redundant.
Well, OK, I will this offer one bit of “wisdom” (not directed to anyone, or toward any argument, in particular, and this might have been more useful earlier in the thread, but what can ya do?): natural selection and speciation often, but do not necessarily, go hand-in-hand. If two populations are kept separated, then the actual mechanism at work whereby the two eventually become unable to interbreed doesn’t matter; they will nevertheless have become separate species. The key is that by keeping the populations separate, they become free to vary independently, and, over time, those variations will accumulate, whether by selection or random fluctuation, to the point whereby the two populations have become distinct. Natural selection can certainly speed the process of speciation, but it does not drive the process. Adaptation, on the other hand, is, pretty much by definition, driven by natural selection. And, of course, speciation often results as a by-product of adaptation.
Humans will, therefore, most likely not speciate (in the cladistic sense, rather than the transformational sense) further until we begin extraterrestrial explorations. Launch 100,000 humans into deep space (in a ship, of some sort, obviously…), and within another couple hundred thousand years, that populatoin will likely become different enough from the remaining terrestrial population to be deemed a new species. Here on Earth, there’s just too much gene flow between populatons for anything other than a very gradual transformation to occur.
I’m sorry to hear about that. Keep trying, mate.
I don’t know about that; your following “wisdom” (about speciation and natural selection not always being one and the same) clarified the point I was fumbling about trying (and obviously not succeeding) to make with the American/Asian black bear example. No doubt you could point to other and perhaps clearer exemplar.
Keep your head up.
Stranger
Finch, imagine how empty GD would be if ANY us had social lives! At least you can get empathy as well as sympathy here. 
For a moment I will channel the part of me that used to hang out in MPSIMS: Have you tried blatantly hitting on any of the Doper Wimmins? And I realize this is a stretch for a lot of guys to do, but have you really tried to recognize if any of them are hitting on you? It’s amazing what cues a guy will miss.
No, I haven’t tried hitting on any Doper Wimmins. Mostly because there seem to be few that are a) single, b) local, and c) within the right age range. And “interested in paleontology and evolution” doesn’t seem to be nearly as big a selling point as one might like to think, even here.
As for anyone hitting on me – I’m either utterly oblivious, or it simply isn’t happening. Experience indicates the latter being the more likely possibility.