Abstract
To start with, neither Joseph Agassi nor I would quarrel over words. What, never? No, never! What, never? Hardly ever! Hardly ever with anyone, but certainly not with each other. But what does one do instead, when someone is using a word wrongly or misleadingly (as one thinks)? Well, various things according to circumstance. One strategy is to point out what is being glossed over in the usage one does not agree with. This is the strategy I shall use on Agassi. Another is to point out something of the price that has to be paid for maintaining the disputed usage (as I do with Mario Bunge in section 4). For example, when people use the word “truth” in the sense of “agreement among experts”, or in the sense of what works, the price is either that a new word has to be found to cover the sense that “truth” has carried for a thousand years of the conformity of beliefs to how things are; or, that conversation proceeds in some confusion. Let me address Agassi directly, for a moment, to explain the disagreement I have with him. Everyone else can read over his shoulder.
Work on this essay was partly supported by a generous grant from the Pascal Centre for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science, Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario, but this in no way implies that the Centre endorses the content.
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Settle, T. (1995). You Can’t have Science as Your Religion!. In: Jarvie, I.C., Laor, N. (eds) Critical Rationalism, Metaphysics and Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 161. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0471-5_6
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