That was a strawman Peeping Tom Bertrand Russell constructed. Henri Bergson based a large portion of his work drawing the distinction between functioning on representation versus functioning on cognition.
representation = passive; science isn't assertive. Science is purely passive which is why scientists can never assert something is true but only that it hasn't been disproven. A scientist can say "this is what general relativity says, this is how general relativity maps onto the bending of light, apply it to your work or not. Take it or leave it."
scientism = passive-aggressive; it is assertive by asserting "no metaphysical woo" passively using representations provided by science. They're like the coworker who passively expresses how he feels about his boss by little gestures.
cognition (what Bergson called intuition) = assertive; it reaches knowledge of truth which is why it can definitely assert something is true. But it isn't forceful so it can't convince other people which is why it only reaches up to your being.
Anyone or anything can definitely assert something is true. Here, I'll do it with a scientific proposition: "Humans definitely evolved from non-human apes."
One thing that distinguishes science from many other modes of thinking is that scientists have learned that things that seem definitely true sometimes turn out not to be, which is why carefully expressed scientific judgements don't go quite so far as I just did. "Our current best explanations for the way the world is have humans evolving from non-human apes, and it currently seems incredibly unlikely that any theory that doesn't have that feature will work out better than those do."
If you come to some intuitive judgement, you may "definitely assert" that it's true. If so, that isn't because intuition has some power to "reach knowledge of truth" that's denied to science. It's because, in the grip of that intuitive conviction, you aren't thinking as careful as scientists-at-their-most-careful do.
> Anyone or anything can definitely assert something is true.
No they can't because sophonts aren't voluntarists. Sophonts are intellectualists. Although judging by your advocacy of the otaku theory of biology you probably have a voluntarist personality.
By the good regulator theorem, human cognition (intuition is bergson's word not mine) must be just as good as scientists-at-their-most-careful or I and you would be dead.
1. It doesn't matter whether "sophonts" (whatever exactly you mean by that) are voluntarists. It might matter whether voluntarism is right, which is an entirely different question, but I don't think it's credible that even that is relevant here. Why should anything so broad as voluntarism be necessary for anyone to be able to "definitely assert" that something is true? (Note that I didn't claim, e.g., that anyone at all can sincerely assert that anything at all is true.)
2. "The otaku theory of biology"? Are you just trolling?
3. "Voluntarist personality" doesn't make any sense. Voluntarism is a philosophical position, not a personality trait. If you mean that I'm the kind of person who believes whatever they feel like, well, please go ahead and believe that if you feel like doing so.
4. There is no theorem that would make us dead if human cognition weren't as good as scientists-at-their-most-careful, and if you think Conant and Ashby proved anything of the sort then I think you are badly deluded. What might be true (though actually I don't believe any theorem comes close to proving this either) is that if human cognition weren't perfect then we would be mortal. Guess what? It isn't, and we are.
Reflect on this: there are at least 200 factual errors on the front page comment sections of Hacker News. Do you nod along while you read it being entertained, or do you pinpoint the errors?
I'm not even talking about nigling details. I saw one comment about relativity with a huge scientific howler right in the middle of it. And people upvoted it sky high.
The people who upvoted it were being passive. The users of this site receive a passive experience and generally speaking are too childish to handle asserting their own mind. Even comments are largely passive. People don't even reflect on the subject-verb agreement of the sentences that they write. They are so childish that asserting themselves by the tiniest amount on their writing is not trivial nor has it reached the point of automaticity.
How does science work? It's largely like reading Hacker News. Scientists download research papers, understand them, and test them... and occasionally come up with new directions and ways (equiv 2 commenting on the newslink).
None of that are assertive. When an assertive person presents himself on a subject, he causes a PARADIGM SHIFT. He doesn't go along with the presuppositions: he creates his own presuppositions. This is Thomas Kuhn's "groundbreaking" thesis on scientific progress: some people internalize other people's presuppositions until they are fossilized in their brains resulting in them kicking and screaming on their death bed when it's time to admit it was a bad idea... or some people are like creative genius Thomas Hobbes who said he didn't bother reading all the failures before him because he was too busy thinking his own presuppositions.
You seem to be arguing different things in every comment.
As I understand it, your thesis now is that most scientists most of the time accept things they hear from other scientists. That's probably true. And it's part of how science works -- which it does, rather impressively on the whole. But the paradigm-shifting stuff is also part of science, and a vital part at that, so if this is meant to connect somehow to your earlier remarks about science being passive, "scientism" being passive-aggressive, and "intuition" being assertive, you have more work to do to justify that connection.
(And, once again, if you want to claim some sort of superiority for "intuition", you need to show not only that intuition purports to assert things more definitely than science does, but also that it does so correctly. Mere overconfidence is not an intellectual virtue.)
Thomas Hobbes was a smart guy. But when he tried to do science and mathematics, the results were not good. The most infamous example: He thought he'd accomplished the so-called squaring of the circle and duplication of the cube. He hadn't. (They are impossible.) So far as I can tell, none of Hobbes's scientific work turned out to have any lasting value.
"Peeping Tom"? I assume you're gesturing towards some sort of accusation here; how about making it explicit (and maybe indicating why, if true, it would tell us anything about the validity of Russell's philosophical opinions)?
It's an allusion to a (not very serious) essay Russell wrote called "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish."[1] Like the much more famous "Why I am not a Christian," this is Russell at peak anti-theism. (Russell's most important work came early, on the foundations of mathematics and the theory of descriptions, but like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, he because an increasingly vocal critic of religion over time. This is apparently an occupational hazard for public intellectuals.)
The actual bit is quite funny and widely quoted:
"Although we are taught the Copernican astronomy in our textbooks, it has not yet penetrated to our religion or our morals, and has not even succeeded in destroying belief in astrology. People still think that the Divine Plan has special reference to human beings, and that a special Providence not only looks after the good, but also punishes the wicked. I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious-for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: "Oh, but you forget the good God." Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious." - Bertrand Russell
Although it can't be said to really present a cogent argument. I doubt such nuns exist outside of an urban legend.
I can't really follow ErotemeObelus's arguments, but he does seem to be familiar with Russell's work.
So you reckon EO's calling him "Peeping Tom Bertrand Russell" because in one of his essays he calls a particular view of God a "Peeping Tom"? That would be ... strange, but I suppose you might well be right.
(I'm familiar with that essay, but didn't make the connection because, well, the fact that someone uses a particular phrase once isn't any reason to apply it at random to them in turn.)
Incidentally, I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that Russell started out doing good technical work in philosophy and then turned later on to anti-theism. E.g., A Free Man's Worship (not exactly anti-theism, but in the same ballpark) is two years before On Denoting (the paper introducing his account of definite descriptions).
representation = passive; science isn't assertive. Science is purely passive which is why scientists can never assert something is true but only that it hasn't been disproven. A scientist can say "this is what general relativity says, this is how general relativity maps onto the bending of light, apply it to your work or not. Take it or leave it."
scientism = passive-aggressive; it is assertive by asserting "no metaphysical woo" passively using representations provided by science. They're like the coworker who passively expresses how he feels about his boss by little gestures.
cognition (what Bergson called intuition) = assertive; it reaches knowledge of truth which is why it can definitely assert something is true. But it isn't forceful so it can't convince other people which is why it only reaches up to your being.