Accordion

I've been stuck for days madly poring over readings and madly drawing schematic diagrams of arguments and counter-arguments. I've reached that point where I can't add any more information (in perfect accordance with the 80-20 rule) by traditional means so I must resort to something else if there is to be any greater understanding. So, without further requireed preamble filler, I present the philosophy of science as one long run-on inaccessible tongue-in-cheek sentence:

"So there's these dudes, right: the logical positivists, and they were all like "human thought goes through stages: religious, metaphysical and scientific" and they laid out all these hardcore logical and empirical rules for how science should go; they were all like "yo, bitch: if you can't observe this shit directly, it ain't shit" and all these philosophers were like "mo'fuck you: we're gonna write detailed critiques of your philosophical project" and all the logical positivists were like Austrian and shit and a lot of them were Jews, and Hitler came and bitchslapped them but they all ran off to the London School of Economics or some shit like that; and David Hume, this madcore guy from the 18th century comes up and he's like "there's a problem with your method: your indiction is not strong" and they were all like "oh, shit!" and all these dudes are like, "we've got answers for you, Hume: 1) induction can co-opt other methods of inference so it's at least as good as any other method (except deduction), 2) your concept of truth is not strong: you think it's justified true belief but it's actually reliably generated true belief" but then someone pointed out that that just raised the question of how we know some method is reliable and they were all like "fuck! We didn't think of that!" and they all suicided themselves by throwing themselves into the infinite regress and then someone else came up and was all like "you're missing the point: induction as a process is what is meant by rationality in scientific cases but we're just talking semantics" and they all growl at each other and this dude Strawson stands up and goes all apeshit and he's spewing out all these arguments, even though only two of them are any good and he's all like "that induction has worked is contingent on the state of the world but that applying induction is rational is a matter of semantics: all our confusion comes from conflating these two worries" but somehow the problem stil llurked around and around comes this guy Popper: mo'fuckin Karl Popper, evil egomaniacal genius who sat around and threatened to emasculate Wittgenstein with a fire-poker, and he was all like "come away from induction, for that is not the way. Science proceeds by conjectures and refutations." and then he's all like "I've solved the problem of induction!" and he blinks but then this other dead French dude Duhem is all like "you can't test conjectures in isolation" and Quine comes along half a century later and bitchslaps that point home and adds his name to it and everyone's lifting their hands in the air and shouting "underdetermination, underdeterimation!" and real scientists are sitting around going "fuck all y'all: we'll just go on making our iPods and Sealy Posturepedics" and some fucker's like "by the way, all your observations are theory-laden" and he shows the scietists this Necker Cube and a Duck-Rabbit and they beat him half-unconscious, smash the Necker Cube and eat the Duck-Rabbit (but the Bird-Antelope manages to fly-run away-up) and then Lipton was all like "to explain why P rather than ~Q we must find and event in the causal history of P that has no corresponding event (or non-event) in the causal history of ~Q" and people were like "'s cool" and he was like "at least this shot's not controversial"... and we haven't even gotten to Kuhn yet, and the po-mos, and the SSK pricks...

Consider: "The potato regrets being pulled from the ground, but how it dances on the grater!"