Pluto is no longer a planet!

[merchimerch]

The high priests of science have spoken and are revoking the title of planet from poor little Pluto! This month we've had a world of possibilities in what kids will grow up learning in their science textbooks. I was rooting for the 12 planet system, but it was not to be.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5282440.stm

It makes me giggle when hard sciences illustrate the issues of representation and naming as well as how relative "truth" is.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I'm a little baffled by this comment! The hard sciences are all about representation and naming, and that's because they don't have quite the same difficulties with "truth". So long as the objects your are dealing with are psychosocial, there's a plausible argument to be made that their names constrain them: society is all about enforcing the strong Whorfian hypothesis. But you really have to be a hardcore nominalist (or a hardcore conspiracy theorist, I guess) to believe that about physics... no?

[merchimerch.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm speaking more to the sort of common perception of science as being "true" and how many of us want what is true to be hard and fast (and unchanging). When something as major as dropping from 9 planets to 8 happens, it just reinforces how wonderfully relative the "truth" is.

[sps.livejournal.com]

But but but the scientific method is all about dynamic adaptation to emerging data. Don't they teach the scientific method in science classes? And don't they teach about the taxonomy debates in biology which lead to the current (quasi-)systematic notion of 'species'?

And what does the linguistic nature of naming have to do with the empirical question of truth?

The questions 'is it a duck?' and 'shall we call it a duck?' are very different, and I cannot imagine a scientist being confused about it - not being confused about it is the very point of science, and quite specifically what distinguishes it from magic.

This 'common perception' is very alien to me.

Though - I did once get into trouble with an (extrmely stupid and very poorly educated) religion teacher because she said that it says in the Bible that a whale is a fish, and was astonishingly offended when I pointed out to her that the Bible says nothing at all in English. Perhaps such people are 'common' in your environment! :)