From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Assumptions vs. assertions (was: Re the Cosmological Bad Dream)
Date: 13 Oct 92 06:28:09 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1992Oct12.183056.71406@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
> In article <1992Oct10.183025.43740@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>>In article <1992Oct09.173634.150896@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

[discussion of possible simultaneous multiple meanings]

>>Do you have any evidence for this?  Does it seem a wholly novel idea
>>that we might want to have support from speaker behavior for what we
>>assert about language?
> 
> I have given examples where I believe exactly this is happening, and Ken has
> rejected them out of hand.  I'm not in the business of doing research into
> "speaker behavior", so there is really nothing else I can offer.

     The problem is that your examples are anecdotal and ad hoc; however, I
have begun to lapse into that myself.  Trying to fit what you're
saying into a framework I can grasp, perhaps you are saying that
hearers process both literal meanings and interpreted meanings
simultaneously.  I say people don't in general behave as if they're
doing that, but the idea maybe isn't all that far out...  

     However we have strayed far from the question we began with.  I'm
interested in the pragmatic status of scientific assumptions, made
because without making them science would be impossible.  That is,
I'm not trying to distinguish between scientific hypotheses and
other assertions, but between what I take to be two kinds of
scientific assertion, for example those in (a) vs. those in (b):

     (a)  Air has weight.
          Space is curved.

     (b)  The physical laws that hold locally, hold throughout the
               universe. 
          There exists a reality outside ourselves which we are
               capable of understanding.

I submit simply that in the case of the (a) sentences, a person
upon hearing them will assume that the speaker has evidence for the
truth of the statements, that the evidence is publicly available,
etc. etc. pretty much as if they were assertions having nothing to
do with science; whereas the examples in (b) are utterances of an
entirely different sort, which we call "assumptions" rather than
"assertions" because the speaker is not asserting that something is
the case based on evidence (there *can* be no evidence of the usual
kind for these), but is using these utterances to set up the
scientific enterprise so that evidence can be sought for other
things.

     A hearer's reaction to the (a) sentences is likely to be, 

          "Oh, how do you know that?"  

whereas in response to the (b) sentences, if they were taken as
ordinary assertions, we might expect 

          "How could you *possibly* know that?" 

and, outside the scientific tradition, ordinary assertions about, e.g., 
unimaginably distant regions of the universe or about "ultimate
reality" would simply be dismissed as bizarre.  Indeed they are
dismissed as bizarre today by people who lack an understanding of the
need for scientific assumptions.

     I suspect that there is no disagreement here; we can know the
content of the (a) sentences but we can't know (but must assume)
the content of the (b) sentences.  My problem is that (to hark back
to the Cosmological Bad Dream) there are scientific utterances that
I don't know whether to assign to (a) or (b), such as a detailed
description of the first three minutes in the existence of the
universe.  I don't know whether they are assertions or assumptions.  I
think the question is important because I think the general public is
also confused.  

-- 
-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
 OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor