The transcript reads:
MT My name is Morten Tønnessen, I’m a PhD student at Department of Semiotics. And – you talked about the difference between physical existence and fictional existence. And I would like you to say something about what role fiction can be said to play within natural science, or applied science.UE No... No, I missed ... the real question.
MT Let me finish. First, it’s obvious of course that imagination and creativity are fundamental traits of humans in many walks of life. And often in applied science, we start out with imagining something that does not exist – it’s totally mind-dependent; and then we carry it into life. So it actually turns into something with a physical existence. Isn’t that the work of fiction?
UE No! I... Take, for instance the cold fusion. Typical example of a scientific hoax. It was untrue. I don’t say that fiction is mistake – which is different. Ptolemy believed in good faith the Earth was still immobile, huh? – and the Sun turned. It was not making fiction – it was committing a mistake. Simple and believed. I say that there is fiction when the author pretends to say the truth, and asks you to pretend that you are believing it. In this case you are in a fictional world. If not, it’s a lie. If I tell you there is an elephant outside, and you naively go out to see whether it is there or not, that is not a case of fiction, I am only a damn liar, that’s all. And you are too much naive, hehe. Except, you are not Thomas Aquinas, because it seems that ... comrades told him, because he was only studying, huh? – 'Thomas, there is an ass flying on the skies', and... (mimics Thomas looking to the skies:) Uh? He went out to look, and, there was not... they laughed: Ahaha... And he said, ‘I believed it was more, very similar... that there was an ass flying.’ Then the monk lied, ehehehe...
2 comments:
Morton,
I completely agree, he seems to have missed your point (or at least how I read your point). There is of course the scientific hypothesis which is a kind of pretending "If such and such was the case, what is it that I would expect..." but the imagination you seem to elude to is deeper than this, an imaginary fictionalizing of how the world MIGHT be. It it neither a mistake, nor an error. It is a kind of leaping forward.
Most of metaphysics is like this, and one might come to believe vividly the metaphysics you end up arguing for, not making them any less fictional or imaginary (or mistaken).
We continually imagine how things might be, conditions that are counterfactual, or simply outside our purview, and if we come to believe in them having either a certain weight of coherence of beliefs, or what is taken to be evidence, this does not keep them from being PRODUCTS of imaginary processes.
The world had to be imagined first as stationary before it came to be theorized as such.
Indeed. Some call it abduction... our way of getting ideas, the first and in a certain sense most crucial step in logical reasoning, and yet one that follows no other rules than its own, namely 'what it appears to make sense to say (or think, or do)'... Some call it intuition (but alas, analytical philosophers, we are told, have no intuition ... too bad for them).
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