Chris Steinbach

I am a programmer working mainly with C++. Currently employed by http://www.securewave.com .

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I have attempted in my posts to apply of a few principles that have worked for me in the past:

• The proliferation of ideas and methods. Or MethodologicalPluralism.
• MakeTheWeakerArgumentTheStronger? (from the sophist tradition)
• Taking ideas to their extremes (which ought to be familiar to XP fans)

These notions have helped me move from an admiration of what I considered the ScientificMethod to a philosophy similar to that of PaulFeyerabend. My original intention was to move back to a position you might associate with SecularHumanism. I never managed this, and right now there seem to be too many other interesting possibilities for me to renew the effort.

This quote has influenced my thinking,

A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. [...] Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.

-- Feyerabend, 1975, AgainstMethod, p. 30

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Thanks for CppDependencyAnalysis -- JohnFletcher

Thanks for trying it. --cs

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