things we thought were true

Tonight in the news... astrology has been off for some 3000 years. Not by a lot, just a smidge. Turns out there are 13 signs, not 12. For some reason it doesn't matter to us because of something to do with the fact that we figure things out seasonally. Still, it seems likely that the precise mathematical calculations made by astrologers must have been... well, wrong.

Last week we talked about new discoveries regarding Pluto and its fellow dwarf planet, Aris. We thought we knew what we meant by planet, and then... we looked at it a new way, and suddenly it was something else. Phenomenology rocks! If you've never read the preface to the play Doubt, it is really worth checking out John Patrick Shanley really embraces the notion of doubt and argues that it while it is uncomfortable, it is an essential part of being human.

Today in class we wrote on a quote I lifted from Shanley's opening to the text of the play from the book of Ecclesiastes. The gist of it is that too much wisdom brings one to sorrow. How true, I suppose, but how pointless. While it may be nice to ignore the news and other inconvenient truths, one cannot simply not know something, unless one is willing to lie to oneself and to others.

Although, I think most big astrology fans and experts will simply readjust their readings based on the new information, while maintaining that the old readings were just fine. The same adjustments were made by those who supported a Ptolemaic view of the solar system. Until it fell apart under the weight of excess data collected by better and better telescopes. But the old system held on for as long as it could, desperately readjusting without throwing out the old wine skins of an earth centered solar system.

Scientists brag that that's what makes science superior to other modes of inquiry. They argue that they are always making progress by creating new paradigms based on new data. Of course, they can't see that their methodology is a paradigm as well, one that does not always work. In other words, science is sometimes not pragmatic. Pragmatism insists on making shortcuts if it looks like it will help. Science rarely takes short cuts.

And yet this past week, a scholarly scientific journal published a study on ESP. Many of the scientists interviewed in response were offended that such non-scientific theories were being proffered as science. Their complaint was the traditional one- hard to falsify, etc. Still, it was published, and now the jury gets to decide.

One wonders if we will see science returning to a new form of scholasticism or even a neo platonism. Stranger things have happened.