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Ronald N. Giere Quotes

Total quotes: 7
“The word planet derives from a Greek word meaning wanderer.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Etymology, What Words Means, Word Origins
“But if one imagines a world in which humans never appeared with their contingently evolved visual system, then there is no basis for assigning colors to any object. Why should a surface with a given surface spectral reflectance be called 'yellow'? Without reference to the particular characteristics of the human visual system, there is no physical basis whatsoever for this identification.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Color, Relativism, Scientific Perspectivism
“For a perspectival realist, the strongest claims a scientist can legitimately make are of a qualified, conditional form: 'According to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the world seems to be roughly such and such.' There is no way legitimately to take the further objectivist step and declare unconditionally: 'This theory (or instrument) provides us with a complete and literally correct picture of the world itself.'”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Epistemology, Perspectivism, Science, Importance of Multiple Database Entries
“The nature of the knowledge itself was rarely questioned. It was taken for granted that scientists were discovering the objectively real inner workings of nature. These workings are there to be discovered. It only takes effort, sometimes requiring huge expenditures of resources, to uncover them. This pretty well sums up the attitude of most people at the beginning of the twenty-first century, including both scientists and nonscientists.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Epistemology, Objectivity, Science
“All observational claims made about the object are made in some perspective or other. Before the seventeenth century, the Milky Way, as part of a commonsense perspective on the world, was perceived using human eyes simply as a broad band of light extending across the night sky. From the perspective of Galileo's roughly thirty power telescopes, it was perceived as being made up of a very large number of individual stars. But this was a change in perspective, not a move from a mere perspective to objectivist truth.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Milky Way, Scientific Perspectivism, Seeing Seeing, Against Objectivity, Perspectivism
“The notion of a law of nature did not arise out of the practice of science itself. Sometime in the seventeenth century, it was imported into discourse about science from Christian theology, both directly, and indirectly through mathematics. Originally, laws of nature were understood as God's laws for nature. Thus, behind the laws of nature was a lawgiver, from whence came the universality and necessity of such laws. It is still common for scientists and commentators on science to speak of nature as being 'governed' by laws of nature, which suggests that somewhere there might be a 'governor.'”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Natural Law, Objectivity, Secularization, Theology, Truth, Secularized Theology, Secularization of Religious Concepts, Secular Theology
“Humans are trichromats, which is to say, their retinas contain three different types of receptors (called cones for their shape when viewed through a microscope) with three different pigments sensitive to three different ranges of the visible spectrum. These three pigments, conventionally labeled S(hort), M(edium), and L(ong), have their peak sensitivities at roughly 440 nm, 53o nm, and 56o nm, respectively, although there is considerable overlap.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Color, Seeing Seeing, Three Is The Number
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