Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Genius of Western Civilization - Ep. 4: Invention & Science (4K). [6-part Celebration of The West]" video.

at 18:27 mins "Discovery of the General truths tat lie behind the facts of the moment." This claim remind me of the debate about science in the 20th century. One frame of this was the neo-Kantians who were addressing epistemically the revolutionary claims of modern science like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. the idea had been that Kant had thought Euclidean Geometry were synthetic a priori truths about space and arithmetic series were functions of time. Relativity and Quantum mechanics proved this wrong, but then also presented a world radically different from common sense and ordinary human experience or even incompatible. Although this part of Kant was rejected as a foundation for science and experience, Kant's phenomena noumena were used in a new way. Ordinary experience though the senses, and the "general terms" we use in speech, are now classed as mere phenomena, and the unknowable noumena becomes the realm of science and law and probability, The scientific description(s) and linguistic frameworks is(are) then "reality" and ordinary human experience becomes mere appearance. As Nietzsche said of Plato just prior to these scientific revolutions, how did the real world become a myth and the ideal the reality? Now Wilfred Sellars took this question in in mid 20th century. his position is Janus faced, on the one hand he regards the scientific descriptions as an advance and the regulative aims of science for a complete unified description of the world a justified project. He sees the progress of science as a process to translate and change our common usage of language referring to concrete objects and use of common generality, into and replaced by the vocabulary of the discoveries of the sciences. So science is revolutionary of our ordinary picture of ourselves in the world, that is transformative, revisionary, prescriptive and we would imagine then capable of eliminating our ordinary usage for scientific vocabulary by education. However Sellars divides these two standpoints as two competing picture of the world the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image. Then he shows though many papers and books that this reduction cannot work when we consider an object we name and use in our ordinary language translated into the scientific vocabulary and still used in the ordinary world. One way is to say these are two radically different semantic spaces: the ordinary space of reasons and the space that is the realm of law. the semantics of placing an object in the logical space of law, is not isomorphic with the ordinary space of reasons. This means we cannot use reference and generality of scientific posits in an ordinary context of speech. That is, to imagine dragging the scientific terms out of their formal frameworks and structures of logic and inference, and then take these abstraction and imagine they can be sued when placed into an ordinary life use. What he says is what people do is to take the formalised terms and then treat them as if they are in a semantics of ordinary usage. There are many arguments in his work about these distinctions and how if at all they relate. here one I thought of myself following a discussion on Novara Media Live last evening round my house. The discussion mentioned some data and a curve of the relation between number of police and crime. I said what about no police, or if everybody is police? My point being that this would have a theoretical place on the graph just by following the semantics and logic of the framework. But in full blown realty no such place can exist. its similar to a point made against me a couple of years ago: that nothing on the economic of supply and demand can allow or create a space for when prices rise so much say for gas, we can just go and cut down a tree in nature. these might be similar points to what is called Sellers fine grained arguments. it means we cannot jsut privilege an autonomous realm or space of scientific objects over common sense because common usage is need to refer and use the objects of science in the real world. it makes reason apparently a dualism of sorts between the old mental and physical descriptions or entitlements or commitments to two different substances.
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