Question
What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
Answer
Not a scientific concept, but a philosophy of science concept that very few appreciate:
I find this poetic thought vastly superior, as an expression of the aesthetic sensibility that drives science, to any bureaucratic notion of falsifiability.
This thought is like an onion. Each time I think about it, I discover another layer of meaning. It is deceptively simple-sounding. Until you start to get the Zen underlying this thought, you don't have a scientific sensibility.
For instance, it took me a decade to understand (to my own satisfaction) why "mathematical" is an absolutely necessary qualifier. Many people claim that their processes are an example of the "scientific method" merely because they deal in falsifiable statements. That's the bureaucrat's view of the dialectics of science. In a more organic creative-destruction view, mathematics plays a far more critical role than people think, that goes well beyond quantification and rigor.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
-- John von Neumann, quoted in James Gleick's Chaos
I find this poetic thought vastly superior, as an expression of the aesthetic sensibility that drives science, to any bureaucratic notion of falsifiability.
This thought is like an onion. Each time I think about it, I discover another layer of meaning. It is deceptively simple-sounding. Until you start to get the Zen underlying this thought, you don't have a scientific sensibility.
For instance, it took me a decade to understand (to my own satisfaction) why "mathematical" is an absolutely necessary qualifier. Many people claim that their processes are an example of the "scientific method" merely because they deal in falsifiable statements. That's the bureaucrat's view of the dialectics of science. In a more organic creative-destruction view, mathematics plays a far more critical role than people think, that goes well beyond quantification and rigor.