S&S vs. SF in BotNS

Jeff Wilson · 24 Dec 2011, 08:34 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:34:12 -0600
Subject: (urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS
In-Reply-To: <4EF49B4F.3060806 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W6264EC536A69C6A6153331CFAA0 at phx.gbl><4EF414CF.3000700 at clueland.com>
	<4EF462C8.909 at gmail.com> <6850562C3B1A4D9BA2DED54E5910C581@Rover>
	<4EF49B4F.3060806 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4EF58E84.9080208 at clueland.com>

On 12/23/2011 9:16 AM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
> This discussion is about giving
> credence to explanations of the Universe, and Jeff pointed out the
> usefulness of a given explanation is the criterion for credibility. The
> criterion works psychologically, but not scientifically, so it actually
> supports rather than negates Lee's original assertion that people
> function by belief.

I think I was speaking about how credibility aids suspension of 
disbelief in a given work of science fiction. Demonstated scientific 
accuracy greatly aids credibility, but it's totally optional: Wells 
articulated that his books were based on impossibilities, yet they are 
undeniably science fiction by the standards of their time as well as ours.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net