🚀 go-pugleaf

christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:

>>In article <schiller.726487694@hpas5> schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c) writes:
>>>My position as a scientist is that facts, i.e. the  results of observation,
>>>are the basis of theories. There are no "well-known" flaws of this position. 
>>>
>I'm afriad that this is simply ill-informed. The observation-theory distinction
>has long been a matter a controversy in philosophy of science. The best-known
>"flaws" are put forward in Putnam's "What theories are not."  The position
>outlined there is a little technical, but the central example is that one
>cannot establish, through obsevation, that a thing is red unless one has
>a conceptual scheme for colors that includes red in advance.

You are right: one needs a concept of red. But a concept and a theory
are two different things. Red is a concept formed by children
before they are six months old, and it gives a name to certain class 
of colours. When a child says: "it is red", it just says, "it has a similar
look than all the previous things I have observed, which I call red".
The statement "It is red" therefore just compares different observations.
Not much of theory there.

			Christoph Schiller