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"Scientific Facts are Social Constructs" - is this true?
- Thread starter gfxtwin
- Start date
Uh, what do you mean? I can't speak for all social scientists but in general I don't think 'common sense' would be something you could say that really existed at all, unless you were referring to the the naturalised beliefs of whomever you were studying.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
I'm gonna need more info on this lecture rather than a single title slide being posted on twitter
The scientific method is essentially something agreed upon, following certain epistemological assumptions on how knowledge can be gathered, or at the very least ignorance reduced.
As such, I would argue that within this framework everything can be disproven, if an experiment shows it to be false, but nothing positively proven. As such, while supreme facts might exist, we have no clear way in making sure of them. Maybe Evolution is false, and in reality it is even more complicated. The evidence so far doesn't bear this out, but with more work, it might.
There are no absolutes.
Of course, that doesn't mean that stuff changes from one moment to the next, nilly-willy. It's just that things taken to be probably true now, can be shown to be false in the future.
Kain-Nosgoth
Member
i wonder what this guy thinks about it :
You might not have said idiot, but in the last thread you certainly said I didn't know anything about science and told people to ignore me. You also said I was just arguing semantics when you were engaged in a semantic discussion with me which I always find funny. This was a year or two ago, I think it was about Ricky Gervais.
There's not much to disagree with you about in that post because you didn't really say anything, but unless you've changed your mind from that thread then you certainly don't believe that science is social.
A classic example of how common it is for many scientists to not think through what historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, are saying. No one is saying they don't believe in gravity.
It is interesting how many people take the word social construct and read as bullshit.
Living in house's is a social construct, so using clothes and the act of playing videogames.
Economy related things are like the ultimate social construct but good luck saying your green piece of paper is worthless because it is fake as a social construct
Good luck saying money is not real without sounding like a Jaden Smith tweet
Living in house's is a social construct, so using clothes and the act of playing videogames.
Economy related things are like the ultimate social construct but good luck saying your green piece of paper is worthless because it is fake as a social construct
Good luck saying money is not real without sounding like a Jaden Smith tweet
boiled goose
good with gravy
There's a bit of muddy discussion here.
Science tries to make models about objective reality.
Science is definitely influenced by social and human issues. When people use "social construct" it implies arbitrary. I think the muddying is what people are using as science, current scientific consensus, science as an institution, as an endeavor, scientific facts, etc
"Science is social" is too broad to of a statement. You have to be more specific.. :/
Chmpocalypse
Blizzard
This premise is laughably false. The scientific method proves itself through the success of falsification and confirmation. It's not something people just agree to because it sounds like it makes sense. And using evolution, which has tons of demonstrable, verifiable evidence, to make your argument? Lololol
Hierophant
Banned
u guys should read this cause its really good
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/190
remember at one point women and black people weren't allowed to vote due to some flawed racial science, anything can be upended
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/190
remember at one point women and black people weren't allowed to vote due to some flawed racial science, anything can be upended
Common sense absolutely exists. I'm surprised anyone would disagree. I mean isn't one of the fundamental techniques of anthropologists to try and find what things a society takes for granted and unpack them? That doesn't mean common sense isn't social, it absolutely is, and that's why it's funny when Humanistic Social Scientists fall back on it.
Yes. They are.
Just like traffic laws and shit.
We have socially constructed scientific concepts and proven them based on our own understanding and perception of the physical world based on the senses we have.
Cloud people from the fifth dimension would potentially have a much different understanding of what the physical world is. Maybe they view things less as molecules and organisms and more as matter vs antimatter
Scientific theories are, for all intents and purposes, proven facts. But the concept of fact itself is a social construct. Fish cant create elaborate flat earth theories as far as we can tell
Just like traffic laws and shit.
We have socially constructed scientific concepts and proven them based on our own understanding and perception of the physical world based on the senses we have.
Cloud people from the fifth dimension would potentially have a much different understanding of what the physical world is. Maybe they view things less as molecules and organisms and more as matter vs antimatter
Scientific theories are, for all intents and purposes, proven facts. But the concept of fact itself is a social construct. Fish cant create elaborate flat earth theories as far as we can tell
"The", the singular here is of course generally doubted by philosophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science, scientific method does not prove itself. Various methods are justified, generally through some philosophical thinking. Ignoring the fact that what constitutes a proof is a philosophical issue, please point me to where "[t]he scientific method" proves itself.
Also when was the problem of induction dealt with?
What is success?
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
why does this sentai have two greens?
Why? I stand by it at that level of broadness, as long as we accept that the object science examines is not itself science. Any statements embedded in that which you disagree with, for instance that this means that science would not inevitably develop in the same way if we all of a sudden forgot all of it, is a point you could argue.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I mean on a very fundamental level yes, even stuff like mathematical axioms and physical theorems. But most of that stuff is consistent enough that its really not worth bothering about except as philosophical wankery (which I'm down for, don't get me wrong)
But science has a long history of treating social constructs as scientific facts for less than desirable social purposes also. So yeah some groups are understandably suspicious
But science has a long history of treating social constructs as scientific facts for less than desirable social purposes also. So yeah some groups are understandably suspicious
Hierophant
Banned
this sort of thing was widely accepted by scientific consensus for centuries and taken as absolute fact, don't dismiss the social constructs argument so quickly
I dislike that trying to understand something better is often reduced to "philosophical wankery". Why should we dismiss trying to better understand what science is?
this sort of thing was widely accepted by scientific consensus for centuries and taken as absolute fact, don't dismiss the social constructs argument so quickly
That doesn't count because we have the good science now. Whiggery yay.
I think this is the problem, one of definitions.
There is rarely anything 'arbitrary' about social constructs. Language, government, law, ethics, economics etc etc. Virtually everything we do is systemic, and subject to analysis and understanding. Social scientists wouldn't be fascinated if all this was 'arbitrary'.
Saying a social construct is arbitrary, 'just a construct', is like saying evolution is 'just a theory'. These words mean a lot more in the fields they pertain to.
And the reason both words have acquired that connotation comes from a sustained attack on the legitimacy of these fields. Scientists need to realize they are better off in solidarity with other intellectuals than by themselves. The same tools that tear us down can be turned against them.
Doctoglethorpe
Member
Yes and no.
If you reach real deep into defining reality, nothing at all is objective including yourself. But that line of thinking is only really beneficial for philosophy, definitely not sciences. Sure, be open to truths changing, but that doesnt mean treat nothing as truth.
If you reach real deep into defining reality, nothing at all is objective including yourself. But that line of thinking is only really beneficial for philosophy, definitely not sciences. Sure, be open to truths changing, but that doesnt mean treat nothing as truth.
I'm sure it has been said, but no, facts are not constructs. The laws of the universe remain whether or not they are measured by man.
Stories change and will likely not be repeated exactly as-is if destroyed, but 1+1 is 2 and will be found to be so by another intelligence if all our knowledge of maths were wiped out.
Stories change and will likely not be repeated exactly as-is if destroyed, but 1+1 is 2 and will be found to be so by another intelligence if all our knowledge of maths were wiped out.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Okay that was meant to be flippant in order to be a bit disarming of people who are dismissive of the very idea, I just mean that being skeptical of if the results from particle accelerators are meaningful or if all of physics is based on fundamentally limited human perspectives comes from a different and largely less material place than being skeptical of the intrinsic truth of medical biology because of its long history with eugenics
You ironically picked one of the best examples to pick apart. 1 + 1 = 2 relies on some axioms we've selected for their usefulness, there are many mathematical systems where it isn't true. How do you physically determine if two things are "the same" for the purposes of addition?
The One Who Knocks
Member
Could you clarify? If you mean "Proof by Induction", induction is the process of proving that a subset of the natural numbers (defined to be the successor set w, granted by the axiom of infinity, such that if x is in a successor set then x is in w; via a subset axiom this construction is a valid set) is a successor set. How one normally is introduced to and thinks of induction can make it seem like it's an assumption, but it's actually a logical consequence of ZF.
EDIT: Thanks for the link!
Socially, it is assumed that when one states "1+1=2" that one is working with ZFC (if not, one typically specifies the framework) and is shorthand. Is the statement "With the following axioms and the definitions of 1, +, 2, = [technically one must actually explicitly define everything one needs and verification that this is allowed, but that is a lot for this post], 1+1=2" not a fact? It is undeniably true that with that framework and how those statements are defined that it is true. It doesn't matter if you use different symbols, it's a consequence of the framework you are taking, and with that framework it can never not be true. To say it might not be true with different axioms is to ignore that the statement itself is a statement on the consequences of a certain framework.
It's depressing that people who should know better are so easily baited into saying dumb shit like this.
PixelatedBookake
Junior Member
Everything is a social construct. Stay woke.
I understand that and almost said as much.
Im referring to numbers in the mathematical sense alone, ignoring anything in the physical world.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Okay but if we ignore the physical world there are an infinite number of other mathematical systems where 1+1=2 definitely isn't true, and we can generate them pretty easily. Bring in the physical world and we're back to the "sameness" problem. Addition is an incredibly useful heuristic we develop almost universally, but its still that
The thing is the bolded was always a strawman created to diminish philosophers along with sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of science. The problem is in large part it's worked. The "science wars" did a lot of damage to the Humanities and Social Sciences, and most of that derives from the idea that we were saying the bolded.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
Replace "Who is Gabbo" with "Scientific Facts are Social Constructs."
Do we even know if it's being argued for or against?
No, the entire premise for this tweet reads like an excuse to make people flip without further context of the lecture being given.
It's quite complicated, but also one of the most famous issues in philosophy and especially important to the philosophy of science.
Here
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
1 + 1 = 2 is not science. Math is a wildly different thing than science. In math, you assume a handful of things and then derive a bunch of rules through deduction. In science, you observe a bunch of things and produce models through induction.
Math is entirely a construct. It can produce different outcomes if you change the foundations. See non-Euclidean geometries. One line intersects two parallel lines at two points... unless youve constructed a different math in which one line intersects two parallel lines at four points, which is a super useful kind of geometry for navigation.
I can't really tell what the professor was trying to say, as it was a single slide in a lecture. I'd have to see the context of his/her arguments to determine accurately what argument was being made.
I think a lot of people get confused when discussing science, because. well, it's confusing. The philosophy of science, for instance, is still studied and highly debated to this day. Are the philosophy of science and the scientific method social constructs? Sure, how could they not be. The scientific method grew up with humanity, and was made rigid in the 17th century. That doesn't make the scientific method any less amazing in how it's able to determine scientific results, but it is still routinely challenged and changed.
Are scientific theories social constructs? Debatable. They're, in the strictest definition, a consensus of evidence pointing towards a model that describes reality. They're not social constructs in that they depend on facts and information alone, and may only be replaced when a more accurate model exists. Theories are also not dependent on your worldview, and may be described by someone in a different society than you.They are social constructs in that people made them, they are only the best model, and not some objective truth, and that they change over time. It's certainly debatable either way.
Are scientific facts social constructs? Nope. It's a fact that the charge of an electron is 1.602*10^-19 coulombs. It's a fact that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. It's a fact that genetic information in all life as we know it exists in a self replicating structure we refer to as either DNA or RNA, depending on the molecules inside. It's a fact that (pure) water is made of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom bound by chemical forces. These are not something that is dependent on understanding a society and they are not subject to change, save for a better experiment being developed.
Scientific facts form theories, and the method they are used to form the theories is known as the scientific method. Only the scientific method is objectively a social construct. Scientific facts cannot possibly be.
I think a lot of people get confused when discussing science, because. well, it's confusing. The philosophy of science, for instance, is still studied and highly debated to this day. Are the philosophy of science and the scientific method social constructs? Sure, how could they not be. The scientific method grew up with humanity, and was made rigid in the 17th century. That doesn't make the scientific method any less amazing in how it's able to determine scientific results, but it is still routinely challenged and changed.
Are scientific theories social constructs? Debatable. They're, in the strictest definition, a consensus of evidence pointing towards a model that describes reality. They're not social constructs in that they depend on facts and information alone, and may only be replaced when a more accurate model exists. Theories are also not dependent on your worldview, and may be described by someone in a different society than you.They are social constructs in that people made them, they are only the best model, and not some objective truth, and that they change over time. It's certainly debatable either way.
Are scientific facts social constructs? Nope. It's a fact that the charge of an electron is 1.602*10^-19 coulombs. It's a fact that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. It's a fact that genetic information in all life as we know it exists in a self replicating structure we refer to as either DNA or RNA, depending on the molecules inside. It's a fact that (pure) water is made of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom bound by chemical forces. These are not something that is dependent on understanding a society and they are not subject to change, save for a better experiment being developed.
Scientific facts form theories, and the method they are used to form the theories is known as the scientific method. Only the scientific method is objectively a social construct. Scientific facts cannot possibly be.
lvl99 Pixel
Member
are we going to have people walking around in Matrix cloaks again?
More_Badass
Member
Geocentrism, humors, phrenology, etc., at one point were believed to be scientific fact; these truths were molded by measurements and observation and the current understanding and perspective of the world and its workings. Perception and our tools to measure and define our observations have defined what is considered fact for all of human history. Consensus based on continually refined theories and repeatable results decides what is fact. It is through accepted truths and norms that consensus is reached about theories and results, and what is accepted is molded by the social underpinnings of the time.
The Jazz Cabbage Master
Member
Need more context than one slide. I hate shit like this.
This is a pretty poor understanding of theories. Theories aren't just a body of facts, they are a a specific framework in which we interpret facts. The part where you said "may be replaced" should clue you into that. If things can be replaced, then clearly something is going on beyond it floating around on some platonic plane.
It's interesting that you're focusing on theories, because the realization that theories are socially constructed, i.e. Kuhn, was the basis from which the rest of the SSK derives. It's essentially the most obviously socially constructed part of scientific knowledge.
Hierophant
Banned
Yeah also this like what if the next slide is like "the last slide is false"
None of these things are true except arguably the first. Saying science is social is not at all too broad. Science is a human activity, humans are social animals, so like any other human activity if you try to understand it without considering the societal aspects you will miss a tremendous amount. If you find this is a strange way to think, please go to any university lab and watch science being done!
Saying something is a social construct is not remotely the same as saying it is arbitrary.
I don't really know what you're trying to say tbh. Who's 'falling back on it' and in what context? You're right in what (socio-cultural) anthropology does, in a broad sense. But that 'unpacking' process tends to upend notions common-sense more than anything else. It might be somewhere you 'start from', but it wouldn't be somewhere you'd 'fall back' to. It stands more as a notion or preconception to be challenged than as an explanation of anything.
Poor GRIMES
Banned
What are the differences between the different sciences? Does SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge, I'm presuming, from a quick search) differ from "scientific facts of biology?" Is there a name for "scientific facts" that are based on evidence? Like the sun's position relative to the Earth's? I'm having an incredibly difficult time parsing through the discourse because the terminology and overall nuance of "this science" versus "this science" are confusing. Also, are all types of sciences socially constructed in the same level? Or are other types of sciences truer than others?
Our constructs of one and addition and maths as a thing are social constructs
Another species may not count individual objects (if they even count how we do) they may look at compared proportions of objects, which could work if they view everything as collections of molecules rather than individual objects like we do
We both agree that 1+1=2 because we agree on what one is, what one of something is, what something is, the fact that the word something means some vague thing, the fact that we both have agreed that all these symbols Im typing equate to the noises our throats make and that that conveys information that makes sense to you, and every other step of everything that leads to that equation, including math as a concept
We could run into an entirely new race that has zero concept of zero or negative numbers, for example. Thats not actually that nuts, because not all of human civilization had those concepts and they got along just fine
I'd argue geocentrism, humorology, and phrenology were all theories. That is, they used the facts that were given to create a model that could predict reality. Using geocentrism as an example, the motion of the planets was a fact. They could be measured accurately, and traced through the years, and forwards and backwards in time. That would not change no matter who measured it, or what language they spoke, or what theories of the universe they prescribed to.
Geocentrism was using these facts to construct a model. For a while, it competed with heliocentrism, because they both described reality equally accurately. Indeed, it took Kepler's theory of elliptic orbits based on his three laws to develop a model even better than what existed. Certainly all of these were social constructs (although ones that were based very strictly off of facts). However, the scientific facts they were based off of (the motion of the planets and stars) were NOT social constructs and could not possibly be.
The same could be said of phrenology and humorology.
When did I solely talk about theories. I spent nearly an equal time describing theories, the scientific method, and scientific facts. Nor did I say they are just a body of facts. Indeed, my exact words were:
which is true. Theories can be replaced, but only by a model that better describes reality. Indeed, most replacements in theories are not because society deemed it so, but because they fit the evidence better. General relativity as a theory would be no more or less true whether or not we had discovered it. In that way, it could be argued that it is or is not a social construct, just as with Newtonian gravity, or evolution.
That still doesn't change the fact that scientific facts are NOT social constructs.
In that post I was just answering your question. The original reason I brought it up is because historians often use the word the same way mathematicians will sometimes use the word trivial.
Sometimes when people get to a gap in their model or research they will say it's common sense or some variant of that. Generally this happens in talks, but I've seen some form of it in footnotes.
Right, that's why I'm saying it's ironic.
Well most people would say it probably shouldn't be. I generally tell undergrads that finding those spots where people say something to this effect is quite useful in figuring out new avenues of research. It's a prepackaged place to insert yourself into a conversation.
Yes, exactly. That's why it's a handwave.