The philosopher John Dewey on knowledge production:
Old ideas give way slowly, for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists—though history shows it to be a hallucination—that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.
From The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, and Other Essays in Contempory Thought (1910)
Posted by karik at May 27, 2005 9:37 PM | TrackBackI'm rusty on my philosophy of science, but see T.H. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution for what I'm seeing at 2:30 in the morning as an evolution of this line of thinking. Less concretely, there's Witgenstein's Ladder which inexplicably fell through the ceiling and into my Beckett class this afternoon. I guess you get to choose between hardcorp history of science from Copernicus to Maxwell's equation or looking at the "is it a duck or rabbit" drawing.