🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <exukjb.293.718490050@exu.ericsson.se>, exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell) writes:

[stuff deleted]

> Can scientists qua scientists call any theory "well-confirmed" or "true"?
> Can a scientist say "It is true that p" where p is some scientific statement 
> like "The sun is 93 million miles from earth" or "Metals expand when 
> heated" ? Would not such remarks be epistemological and not scientific? 
> 
> Just wondering what a Searlian speech-act theorist would say about that.

I think such statements as you mention may or may not be ordinary
assertions; what I'm mainly interested in is assumptions that science
has no evidence for in the usual sense, but which are necessary in
order to carry on the scientific enterprise.  For example in my field,
Linguistics, we assume that all the languages ever spoken had pretty
much the same properties as the languages we know first-hand.  If we didn't
assume this we would be free to "write off" any funny-looking
phenomena from the past as due to arbitrary changes in the nature of
language, instead of being forced to try to explain them.

I'd like to emphasize that Searle and others who
have developed Speech Act Theory (as well as other people in
Linguistics who are working on questions of pragmatics) have not had
*anything* to say (that I'm aware of) about the language of science.
It's just something that I'm exploring.
-- 
-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
 OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor