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Monday, August 15, 2005

Philosophy In 60 Seconds

Lesson One: 20th Century Philosophy of Science

In olden days when Miltie wrote a lot
Empiricism was on top.
Now heaven knows,
Anything goes.

Carnap and Ayer, who Comte’s
successors were,
Guarded the paradigm and kept it pure.
If Popper blows,
Then anything goes.

Falsifying,
And Kuhn-denying
Is not just trying
To show pigs flying
Above the head of Imre Lakatos.

Feyerabend a method won’t accept,
That Aussie prof’s verklept;
So don’t propose
Anything goes!

3 comments:

Vitae Scrutator said...

As a matter of fact, Popper does blow.

Or at least he did. He's dead now.

Kathy Hutchins said...

Popper was still alive when the first version of that specimen was written.

The co-author, who I am sure will be quite relieved to remain nameless, was my office-mate in graduate school. We wrote it in a bar in Dallas, trying to recover from a peculiar class during which the professor who was trying to shove some epistomology in our heads had forced us to watch the film Last Year at Marienbad. He claimed it was a metaphorical representation of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.

All our teachers thought I was a much more promising student than he. I'm now an overeducated housewife, and he's a senior economist at one of the regional Federal Reserve banks.

Rafe said...

I hope he became a good economist, knowing all about Hayek and the synergy between Popper and the Austrian school!

TAG