Professor Chomsky Presents a Problem for Empiricists, Positivists, Materialists

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. 'deprives it of much significance' is a subjective opinion

and, in my own opinion, that's a load of twaddle. There is immense significance in the forces of gravity, electromagnetism and so on; these forces are predictable, understood to an incredible degree, and knock the fields of things like theology or even Chomsky's own work on linguistics into the realm of complete guesswork. It's the understanding of them which forms the basis of modern technology.

These forces may be 'mysterious' to you, but I have a reasonable understanding of them, and physicists a very good one. If your definition of 'mysterious' is "not everyone understands them completely", then, OK, they're mysterious to some. But the failure of some part of the population to understand something does not have 'much significance', as you might say.

It's not that Newton, or anyone else, removed a reasonable idea of 'cause' from the ideas about motion; he corrected the ideas about what happens, and made people realise that it did not all depend on 'matter' directly touching in some form, and that such a claim had never been a decent explanation of things.