February 04, 2017 Saturday
Bedtime Story
How Close the Nyaya School Came to Scientific Method
The scholars knew that their system of anumana had its drawbacks
and pitfalls.
So the step 2 (the reason) was set up with stringent conditions.
So in our case, the reason being death, would be besieged with
following conditions:
1. Death must be present in the body to make such an inference.
2. Death must be present in all such cases of septic shock.
3. Death must be absent in all non-cases of septic shock.
4. Death must not be incompatible with such a medical condition.
5. Any and all other contradictions by other means of knowledge
should be absent.
Though it is obvious from the first glance that it not a full-proof
technique, yet it is interesting as a kind of rigor is being attempted to the
idea of inference and thereby to the acquisition of knowledge itself.
As if this was not enough (and it is not), the school developed a
theory of errors.
The theory of errors included a methodology of identifying errors
(in knowledge acquisitions via conclusions) by spotting the inconsistencies and
contradictions and then resolving them using the technique of reasoning.
I shall not go into the details of error identification, even
though I found the process most delightfully engaging and illuminating.
The greatest aspect of this school of logic was they knew that our
mental faculties are often misleading and acquisition of knowledge is filled
with the hazard of specious conclusions.
It is a kind of acknowledgement that our brain works on some set
principles of heuristics, wherein from the available data from the five senses,
it computes the statistically most probable reason that would be evolutionary
sensible.
This is coming very close to the heels of the scientific method
where the Nyaya School got observation, analysis (? Statistical) and inference
part right.
The only thing that evaded them and that was of course a
significant overlook was the idea of tinkering with nature, or the idea of
experimentation.
The concept that nature is like a shy woman from whom truth needs
to be gently teased out with subtle fiddling and fine manipulations was missed
out.
For it to get established, we would have to wait almost 18
centuries or so.
As you can see, though logic was always used in mathematics
throughout the history (if you even vaguely recall how theorems we used to
prove in the high school), mathematics was never applied to logic.
Somewhere in the 1800s this would change.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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