Grasshopper

Alien Phenomenology, Vegetable Edition

Alien Phenomenology

Here's a set of links to the collected adventures of Sparkychan (the pink one) and Gojochan (for Gojira aka Godzilla).

Bats, Beagles, and Kuhn’s Problem

We know that bats and beagles live in very different sensory words, sensory worlds that are different from ours as well. This causes us no distress. We understand that bats and beagles live in different life worlds—which differ from ours as well—and that they each have sensory and motor equipment appropriate to their world. Though we can’t hear sounds that bats can, we know of and can measure such sounds, and the same holds true for smell and beagles.

All of this makes sense in the generous framework of biological evolution. No one has fits about “relativism” over the fact that animals live in worlds constructed by their sensory and motor capabilities. No one worries that the constructedness of animal worlds somehow threatens the fabric of reality. Bats and beagles have different life worlds, but we understand that neither of those life worlds is THE WORLD, writ large.

So why does the fact that Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian mechanics cause us some little distress? That’s what I’m calling Kuhn’s problem since, as I explained in an earlier post, he’s the one who explicated the problem in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Bats and beagles have in different life worlds as Newtonians and Einsteinians have different mechanics. But in all cases THE WORLD is the world, no?