Room For Muddy-Handed Disciples?

Of all the people to star this thread, I didn't suspect it'd be you, Biollante. you're usually the peace maker

I'd have to say yes. I may disagree with parts of it, some parts may be outdated but ultimately it justifies its self better than most other books I've read related to aquariums. As Tom mentioned, it's over 10 years old; if you go 10 years back on anyone in this hobby, odds are they have a number of misconceptions that they've eliminated today. Being scientific doesn't mean being right after all, it's just the best tool at hand by leaps and bounds.

At times everyone is; I'm unaware of any person in history who can't stand up to rational critique in some way. Tom's PO4 experiments discredited the Conlin-Sears paper, Amano's products show faulty methods and at times questionable business ethics and Ole's refutation on allelopathy shows Diana's. This does not eliminate their importance to the hobby.

I think there's been some confusion here; my issue in the previous thread was not with Diana or her actual work. I'd put a lot more thought into my post if it were, and I would've started it as its own thread rather than as a threadjacking.

My issue was with a few people who have erroneously picked up her work and bent it out of context because their life is defined by the informal logical fallacy known as appeal to nature. Any individual espousing that something is superior purely because it is natural is one I try to distance myself from for the sake of my own physical and mental health.

Now this is the question I came here to debate. My answer is both yes and no, depending on the context. I suspect most of you will fall asleep while reading this...

Objectively, a thing is true regardless of our analysis. If you look at many practices before scientific methodology, you will find that they were not even worthy of being called a thesis, and the antithesis given by others was just as full of logical fallacies. At the same time, some of them worked. More simply put, the truth is not determined by our opinions.

Subjectively, a concept or practice must undergo rational critique for us to understand how and why it works. We can not say why anything occurs until we understand its inner workings, and can only comment within the context of those working at we understand. As an extension of this, it can honestly be stated that the entirety of our existence is lived as a post hoc fallacy so long as our subjective awareness does not extend to the full bounds of objective reality.

If someone tosses together a miracle compound that causes perfect plant growth, but has no understanding how it works, I would not deny the results. But first the fact that this compound works would have to be established, which is harder than most people think. Interpreting what has just occurred is the perpetual challenge of our existence.

No concept should ever be held as immune to criticism because of this subjective/objective difference; not even bivalent logic. Perhaps this is just a sandbox in which is/not happens to apply absolutely within a larger universe that does not adhere to these principles. Being pure conjecture, the probability of this concept should be considered a percentage that is an imaginary number; the smallest possible. All the same, because of our subjective nature it can not be disproven, only regarded as a waste of time given what we have observed so far of reality. In all, bivalent logic stands up pretty well.

So then, from bivalency onwards we have a system of absolutes. Things are or are not; nothing is "sort of" it is only unarticulated. Logic has the failure of being a self-seeking system; nothing outside of it will ever be found using logic. It will be filed under, "lacking enough empirical evidence to understand." At the same time, we have no better system to replace it.

From here empiricism is used in an attempt to share our subjective knowledge, logic is applied to spot contradictions based on this shared empirical observation, and presupposition, and through this we filter what is from what is not in order to determine whether a concept is true based on the presented evidence. As this evidence changes, so does our understanding of what is true.

In summary, a concept must be proven to work for us to trust it enough to use it. What is known of it should be used to determine why it works, and indeed whether it works. Without the first part, there is no rational reason to use a method, without the second nobody can lay claim to how it functions. The first part, in many ways, also necessitates the second in order to determine if a thing works.

-Philosophos

 

I am posting to this topic because I helped to hijack the original thread (which was quite interesting, by the way.) I don't have a lot to add to what has already been posted.

Having said that, I will continue.

It is unarguable that there is room in this hobby for the technopriests, the muddy-handed folks, and all participants in between. There are scientific truths that can be learned from growing aquatic plants, interesting observations of plant-animal-environmental interactions can be made, and people can just have fun growing things. There is so much here!

A lot of the basic truths on which we now depend were developed centuries ago, based primarily on observation of what was happening, without there being much knowledge of the "why" part of it. I am thinking about astronomy and mathematics, in particular.

Darwin was not a scientist when he made his observations about finches; he just wrote down what he saw and speculated as to the cause.

Arguably, a college physics undergraduate understands more about basic physics than did Einstein 100 years ago, when he presented his theories of relatively.

Thoreau? He was a hippy philosopher who didn't pay his taxes. But he was a keen observer and wrote very well.

As I said, I didn't have a lot of new stuff to offer.

Bill