Tuesday, September 29, 2020

A Useful Reminder

 Noticed this evening in "Preface to an Unwritten Book", collected in Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings:

... there will remain over no relic of the good old tenth-century infallibilism, except that of the infallible scientists, under which head I include not merely the kind of characters that manufacture scientific catechisms and homilies, churches and creeds, and who are indeed "born missionaries," but all those respected and cultivated persons who, having acquired their notions of science from reading and not from research, have the idea that "science" means knowledge, while the truth is, it is a misnomer applied to the pursuit of those who are devoured by a desire to find things out.

 I presume that "misnomer applied" should be something like "misnomer for that, and properly applied".

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