Physics Help and Math Help - Physics Forums PF Lounge General Discussion PDA View Full Version : Google Books turbo-1 I was not sure to put this post, since it could be of possible benefit to everyone here, but if the mods think it's advisable, I'm sure they'll put it someplace appropriate. Google has a new feature that lets you search the content of books. Sometimes it's only relevant excerpts and tables of content, but if you toggle the preference from "All Books" to "Full View Books", you can get to read entire books and journals.
It's pretty nice, although when I Googled "epistemology", almost all the books returned were from before 1920. That's a bit disturbing. Do people not bother researching the origins of the ideas underpinning their assumptions, or has that practice fallen out of favor, or is it perhaps practiced under another name?
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as "necessities of thought," "a priori givens," etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors. Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, or replaced if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason. | |
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