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ChristianKl comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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Alfred Korzybski - Science and Sanity Page 55
While this is true, it's often the case that you have to start by collecting the isolated facts, just as you'd start building a house by buying some number of bricks.
Arguably you'd start building a house by deciding what kind of house do you want and then making architectural plans and drawings...
Arguably, an early step in building a brick house will consist of gathering a bunch of bricks together. Arguably, that was obvious enough in the earlier comment to not benefit from correction.
The original quote was sufficiently meta that I think Lumifer's point stands.
Please name a science (not math, not philosophy) that did NOT start as a bunch of bricks.
We don't have to ignore the real world when we go meta, do we?
Science is a way, a method -- it neither started as, nor is a collection of facts.
The world is full of bricks/facts -- they are everywhere you look and the problem is not finding some, but finding the ones you need. And to figure out which ones you need you require some plans and ideas about how to go about things.
So while you are there staring at your navel, trying to come up with a plan in the complete absence of any knowledge of the world, some other guy is fascinated by a smoking stump left over from a lightning strike and screwing around with it a bit discovers fire.
Science is a human activity that arose from human activity and stayed around and was refined because it filled human needs. Scientific method did not arise from a plan it arose from contemplation of piles of facts. Chemistry and physics arose from different contemplations of different piles of facts.
You need to look at the world full of bricks and facts to have some idea how you are going to go about triage, you don't figure out how to triage facts until you know a bunch.
That's only once pre-engineering has been shown to be successful in building houses, which is a nontrivial proposition.
Sure, but who claims/acts as if isolated facts do produce a science? This seems to be taking down a strawman.
Also, the analogy is misleading. A heap of bricks arranged in the right way with the right sorts of mutual connectors does produce a house. However, even an appropriately arranged and connected set of facts does not produce a science. At best, it produces a theory, which is a product of a science, but not a science itself. Science is more akin to architecture than to a house.
Science classes, especially before high school level, are often taught as though science is just a collection facts about trees or dinosaurs or whatever. Anyone who hasn't had the benefit of a good science program in their school might continue to think that science is just experiments to generate facts.
Korzybski is not here arguing against anything, but making an exposition. I won't type in the whole passage (which is only a Google search away anyway), but the quotation is from the beginning of chapter 4, entitled "On Structure", which is the first chapter of the second section of Science and Sanity, entitled "General on Structure". The first section, of three chapters, was introductory, an overture. He begins the main opera by drawing attention to two clear trends in the development of science: the increasing reliance on experiments, and the increase of verbal rigour. "The second tendency has an importance equal to that of the first; a number of isolated facts does not produce a science any more than a heap of bricks produces a house. The isolated facts must be put in order and brought into mutual structural relations in the form of some theory. Then, only, do we have a science."