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[plagiarize]

It's not casting doubt on that, it's contextualizing the actual epistemological situation of our knowledge. We can still proceed with effective certainty that it will work, without acting like it must work on some platonic level.

It may not intentionally be casting doubt, but arguing that something is less likely than understood or accepted is literally casting doubt by definition, no?

Pointing out that I am making some small amount of presumption to say water at one atmosphere always boils at the same temperature does what for me? What does that information offer me? There is literally no reason to presume otherwise. Every time this has been observed it has happened the same way. We have come to observe the mechanics in more detail as our ability to study such things has improved. We now understand why water takes more energy to boil than alcohol. We understand the process to a higher level. We know that it will always boil at the same temperature and not just because every observation has played out the same way.

Pointing out that we can't ever truly be certain of anything is useless even if the rhetoric is completely sound.

Telling me that I can't ever be sure that what I experience as reality is in fact real, doesn't aid me in navigating what I experience as reality in any way shape or form. Anything that leads me to question this reality as truly real is most likely to harm my ability to navigate it.

If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it, is a fun hour of high minded debate. Perhaps it's a good mental exercise.

But it makes a fucking sound.

 

[The One Who Knocks]

If you were sitting in a cave without language and never having come into contact without another human I doubt you would create the concept of 2+2=4 that we have. Even if you would come up with something similar on your own because their is a reality to which we refer in creating ideas.

Of course your hypothetical doesn't exist, and doesn't say anything about the conception of 2+2=4 which we currently have, which was created by people using words, and which is clearly embedded in society. The fact that some mythical lonely person in the state of nature could come up with a similar idea doesn't mean the idea we have now wasn't created socially.

But irrespective of whether you would or would not, that would have no impact on how that statement as we define it would still be true in the mathematical framework we use. It would be exceedingly unlikely you would have the same framework (which developed socially as you say) let alone notation, but an awareness of it would not impact its truth. One would (almost certainly as past civilisations did, but not as rigorously or fundamentally sound as hours is today) develop their own mathematical framework, and it too would have its own truths. Yes, the mathematical framework we use is entirely socially constructed (in so much that the most commonly used on today was chosen and developed [or discovered depending on ones viewpoint on that matter] for arbitrary reasons and there's no clear objective reason to choose it over another), but I find it difficult to state that the truth of the results is a social construct, it's not, it's a consequence of axioms whether you use them or not (and whether you do or do not and how you denote them indeed is socially motivated).

 

[PdotMichael]

Hot takes, these ideas that have been in the academy for decades now and are the subject of much discussion? Come on, you aren't even trying. You're just handwaving me away because I is agree with you. I even just gave you an example, Malthus was instrumental to the development of Evolution, but you don't seem to care.

Do you know how to do things besides just insult people, make random statements that don't have much content, and ignore any arguments that you can't even muster up that sort of response for for?

The joke about Malthus was that he used the methology of ecologists for his population theory.
But even ignoring that point, you still didn't provide which fundamental things natural scientists can learn from social sciences.

 

[plagiarize]

I mean it's poor epistemology, and this understanding is harmful for the self-correcting nature of science.That's pretty obvious. Science relies on the fact that what it's saying isn't the be all end all. That if better information or a better interpretation is generated, that it will incorporate that.

That's the great irony of all this. The reason science even works and is useful is because it's a social construct. Scientists at some level accept that, but because of the form of popular scientism, and to some degree the two culture problem, they refuse the broader framework.

Turning science into a golden calf is anathema to the scientific project, it's honestly baffling to me that people that are supposed to care about science would ever be okay with that.

This though is talking about scientific theory rather than scientific fact. I don't think *science itself* has a problem understanding the difference. Theories are not golden calfs. The most famous scientists are the ones who showed that previous theories were wrong, not the ones who most slavishly protected the current understanding from newly observed truths that proved the current understanding to be incomplete or incorrect.

 

[EGM1966]

If you were sitting in a cave without language and never having come into contact without another human I doubt you would create the concept of 2+2=4 that we have. Even if you would come up with something similar on your own because their is a reality to which we refer in creating ideas.

Of course your hypothetical doesn't exist, and doesn't say anything about the conception of 2+2=4 which we currently have, which was created by people using words, and which is clearly embedded in society. The fact that some mythical lonely person in the state of nature could come up with a similar idea doesn't mean the idea we have now wasn't created socially.

I don't believe you're understanding what 2+2=4 represents if you think that. It doesn't matter where you are or what words you use the result is the same as a mathematical proof. It's not subjective in any way.

 

[Cocaloch]

It may not intentionally be casting doubt, but arguing that something is less likely than understood or accepted is literally casting doubt by definition, no?

I guess, but only insofar as it is putting us at the correct level of doubt. I'd say it's less about casting doubt and more about dispelling unrealistic certainty. But this doubt is totally marginal.

Pointing out that I am making some small amount of presumption to say water at one atmosphere always boils at the same temperature does what for me? What does that information offer me? There is literally no reason to presume otherwise. Every time this has been observed it has happened the same way. We have come to observe the mechanics in more detail as our ability to study such things has improved. We now understand why water takes more energy to boil than alcohol. We understand the process to a higher level. We know that it will always boil at the same temperature and not just because every observation has played out the same way.

I answered this above in a later edit.

Pointing out that we can't ever truly be certain of anything is useless even if the rhetoric is completely sound.

Even if it's just philosophical, I don't agree with you. I think there is some value in good thought for it's own sake. Of course there is also clear utility in this that science is based on. See above.

Telling me that I can't ever be sure that what I experience as reality is in fact real, doesn't aid me in navigating what I experience as reality in any way shape or form.

Okay

Anything that leads me to question this reality as truly real is most likely to harm my ability to navigate it.

This is an assumption that doesn't hold up. Ancient people were sure they lived in a world inhabited by spirits. Their cultural framework told them that certain natural phenomenon were clear as day evidence of this. Being aware that the world around you isn't necessarily always exactly what you think it is ends up being incredibly important to the development of science and good thought generally.

If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it, is a fun hour of high minded debate. Perhaps it's a good mental exercise.

But it makes a fucking sound.

Okay.

 

[tkscz]

Value doesn't derive from utility. Equating utility to value is how a lot of people go through life, sure, but it's not really true. And the statement carries philosophical value, unless you mean to say philosophy is without value?

Technically reality is without value unless given some by those who live in it. Value is given on a personal level. Value is a social construct.

I get both sides of this argument, and quite frankly neither is wrong, it's more of how we see the meaning of a social structure. Science is a social construct by it existing at all. Science in itself is the idea of humans trying to grasp the facts of reality, but throughout human history, these facts have been wrong and many ones that were correct were tossed to the side. That's social, people disliked the notion of being incorrect and would ignore an idea until a larger group of people begin to believe in it and change the minds of the other (with sufficient proof of course). However, the discoveries themselves are not really social. Black holes exist, and science only steps out to say that. How one feels about black holes won't be explained by astronomy, and geology can tell us a history is there through the stones of the Earth, but that's it. The rock is shiny and they can see it's mineral structure and tell you the family it's under, but what value it has to society is usually not something geologist care about (some but not all). Basically, the methodology of results of science aren't social, the people in involved in the discoveries can be.

 

[Cocaloch]

The joke about Malthus was that he used the methology of ecologists for his population theory.
But even ignoring that point, you still didn't provide which fundamental things natural scientists can learn from social sciences.

Malthus was basing his work on the Political-Mathematics of men like King and most especially the Political-Economy of Smith. He did not use the methodlogy of a field that was yet to be created.

Even if he did this would be an example of an idea going from science to humanistic social science back to science. Clearly that would not be a one way street. Your argument is all over the place.

I don't believe you're understanding what 2+2=4 represents if you think that. It doesn't matter where you are or what words you use the result is the same as a mathematical proof. It's not subjective in any way.

I think it's absolutely subjective in every way. We make up some axioms and definitions and then proceed based on them. There are arguments against this understanding of math that I think are at least somewhat valid, but dismissing this out of hand is a joke. Formalism isn't exactly some harebrained conspiracy.

This is of course ignoring what I was actually saying there, which is that the concept 2+2=4 would end up being culturally constructed because we would be making it from within a cultural framework that shapes our understanding of each of the concepts involved.

This though is talking about scientific theory rather than scientific fact. I don't think *science itself* has a problem understanding the difference. Theories are not golden calfs. The most famous scientists are the ones who showed that previous theories were wrong, not the ones who most slavishly protected the current understanding from newly observed truths that proved the current understanding to be incomplete or incorrect.

Facts are made and understood within theoretical frameworks. Facts are also replaced all the time, that's part of why science is so good and useful.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

Again, these kinds of statements are without value.

Yes, you can point out that we can't ever truly know anything for sure. But what value does that offer us? Pointing out that we can't be at every single instance of water boiling at one atmospheric pressure to check that it still requires the same amount of energy to turn from a water to a gas, offers us *nothing*.

If that's your takeaway, you didn't really read what I wrote. As I said, humans are forced to reason by induction for the sake of functional utility. We're probably not as metaphysically far apart as you think.

It isn't a social construct to point out that water boils at a single temperature. It is a daft thing to try and shine doubt on, when entire countries were built in part on the "presumption" that steam was *reliable*.

*Declares that it is not a social construct, cites the social construct of the nation as evidence*

Ok.

It is absolutely a social construct when you are communicating with me, a fellow socially situated agent, assigning an ontological value to it according to your human estimation, and using rhetoric to establish it in a cultural context as a nodal axiom in our shared distributed cognition.

You're confusing an {externality} - bubbles coming out of hot water* - with the scaffolding you're building around it and trying to establish within your environment at a discursive level: 'fact,' 'truth' etc.

"Nervous systems do not form representations of the world, they can only form representations of interactions with the world." (Hutchins, 1995) - just about all cognition is socially or environmentally construed.

*this strikethrough to try and erase a textual representation is as close as I'll get here to a Derridean negation of logocentricity.

 

[plagiarize]

This is an assumption that doesn't hold up. Ancient people were sure they lived in a world inhabited by spirits. Their cultural framework told them that certain natural phenomenon were clear as day evidence of this. Being aware that the world around you isn't necessarily always exactly what you think it is ends up being incredibly important to the development of science and good thought generally.

To your last point, sure. Sometimes what we believe to be real isn't, and it's good for us to be aware of that fact.

I was speaking personally when I spoke of my reality. My own reality acknowledges that my senses can be unreliable. I was talking in terms of ideas such as am I dreaming I am awake right now, or are we living in a computer simulation, vs... do I believe in the existence of an entity that doesn't really exist.

The entirety vs the aspect.

I definitely didn't frame it well.

 

[plagiarize]

Facts are made and understood within theoretical frameworks. Facts are also replaced all the time, that's part of why science is so good and useful.

Scientific facts *aren't*, at least not in terms of what *scientists* characterize as scientific facts.

What your average person understands the term to mean, absolutely. Those 'scientific' facts change all the time. But they aren't facts as science defines them in the first place.

So again, it's not something science has an existing problem with. Science does not protect theories like sacred cows. That's not an actual problem that needs addressing. Science doesn't need to be told to question it's conclusions. It does already.

 

[ken_matthews]

It's not casting doubt on that, it's contextualizing the actual epistemological situation of our knowledge. We can still proceed with effective certainty that it will work, without acting like it must work on some platonic level.

And yet, professional historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers of science, not to mention one of the greatest philosophers of all, David Hume, point this out. Maybe there's some value to be found here.

I mean it's poor epistemology, and this understanding is harmful for the self-correcting nature of science.That's pretty obvious. Science relies on the fact that what it's saying isn't the be all end all. That if better information or a better interpretation is generated, that it will incorporate that.

I am not sure what you are trying to say. Are you suggesting that the experimental results and predictions of science cannot actually say something true about reality because inductive reasoning is the bases for the scientific process? Does something have to be falsifiable through contradiction to have any truth leg to stand on? Cartesian doubt?

 

[Lostconfused]

So again, it's not something science has an existing problem with. Science does not protect theories like sacred cows. That's not an actual problem that needs addressing. Science doesn't need to be told to question it's conclusions. It does already.

Science doesn't but people do. Today's google doodle is kinda on point with this too.

 

[plagiarize]

If that's your takeaway, you didn't really read what I wrote. As I said, humans are forced to reason by induction for the sake of functional utility. We're probably not as metaphysically far apart as you think.



*Declares that it is not a social construct, cites the social construct of the nation as evidence*

Ok.

It is absolutely a social construct when you are communicating with me, a fellow socially situated agent, assigning an ontological value to it according to your human estimation, and using rhetoric to establish it in a cultural context as a nodal axiom in our shared distributed cognition.

You're confusing an {externality} - bubbles coming out of hot water* - with the scaffolding you're building around it and trying to establish within your environment at a discursive level: 'fact,' 'truth' etc.

"Nervous systems do not form representations of the world, they can only form representations of interactions with the world." (Hutchins, 1995) - just about all cognition is socially or environmentally construed.

*this strikethrough to try and erase a textual representation is as close as I'll get here to a Derridean negation of logocentricity.

My point, which I'm sure you well understood, was that water boiling at a specific temperature was chosen as a means to power things, because it reliably boils. Like the smartphone example given earlier. The facts that pertain to semiconductors and magnetic states and the negative charges of electrons that make a smart phone work, aren't a social construct. They aren't only true because we accept them to be. They are immutable.

Again, unless you want to define things in such a way as to basically say 'there is no such thing as a fact', but that seems like a ridiculous way of defining things, without any functional use.

Our understanding of the *facts* of the universe allowed us to put things into orbit. When we realized our understanding was incomplete it was because we found new facts. And the facts that we had formed our original understandings around, remained true.

The facts as science describes them, remained immutable. They still do. Any new theory still has to fit all the facts the last theory did.

 

[EGM1966]

Malthus was basing his work on the Political-Mathematics of men like King and most especially the Political-Economy of Smith. He did not use the methodlogy of a field that was yet to be created.

Even if he did this would be an example of an idea going from science to humanistic social science back to science. Clearly that would not be a one way street. Your argument is all over the place.



I think it's absolutely subjective in every way. We make up some axioms and definitions and then proceed based on them. There are arguments against this understanding of math that I think are at least somewhat valid, but dismissing this out of hand is a joke. Formalism isn't exactly some harebrained conspiracy.

This is of course ignoring what I was actually saying there, which is that the concept 2+2=4 would end up being culturally constructed because we would be making it from within a cultural framework that shapes our understanding of each of the concepts involved.



Facts are made and understood within theoretical frameworks. Facts are also replaced all the time, that's part of why science is so good and useful.

Axioms and definitions are merely the constructs we use f course. I'm referring to the meaning of the proof which cannot by definition be subjective. The proof exists below that and is an absolute. What it expresses can only ever result in the same result every time without fail. You can use any language term or axiom you want but the result is the same. Either we're totally speaking at odds or I'm missing what you're trying to argue but a proof is a proof it's not subjective other than the terms we use to define it as words are.

 

[theinternetman]

Cocaloch is frustrated because he broke a chair in his college physics class. He's been taking it out on science ever since.

 

[Cocaloch]

Scientific facts *aren't*, at least not in terms of what *scientists* characterize as scientific facts.

Are you sure scientific facts are replaced all the time? That seems like a pretty silly assertion. It also relies on two premises. Facts are unconnected to theory, and that theories are the only thing that science replaces.

What your average person understands the term to mean, absolutely. Those 'scientific' facts change all the time. But they aren't facts as science defines them in the first place.

What term? Facts? We had a long discussion about that one pages ago. I'm not super keen to revisit it because I've already spent far too much time in this thread. That being said I'm not particularly sure scientists have authority over the epistemological claim about what a fact is.

So again, it's not something science has an existing problem with. Science does not protect theories like sacred cows. That's not an actual problem that needs addressing. Science doesn't need to be told to question it's conclusions. It does already.

Scientists do this in effect without actually understanding the broader meaning of what they're doing. This is clear. I mean the whole point of the history, sociology, anthropology, and, to a much lesser extent, philosophy of science is to look at what scientists are doing. We're aware that scientists do these things, we're also aware that in doing them they are engaging in a complicated social process. Scientists are often quite blind to this fact, even if many at least see the legitimacy of Kuhn.

So the problem isn't that we need to remind scientists to remember to incorporate new data, their methodology does that by itself. The problem is we need to get scientists to realize what it means that they do that.

Are you suggesting that the experimental results and predictions of science cannot actually say something true about reality because inductive reasoning is the bases for the scientific process?

No, but this centers on epistemological notion of what truth is that frankly I don't want to spend time dealing with at the moment. What I'm saying is that a better way to look at truth is as a scale quantity. Some things are more or less true, and there is value in more truth. But obfuscating that ultimately is a bad thing.

Does something have to be falsifiable through contradiction to have any truth leg to stand on?

No, that's only correct if things have to just be either true or false. This isn't exactly mind blowing stuff either. I mean this has been floating around as an answer to this problem since at least the Scottish enlightenment, and certainly it's been a common way of thinking for the last 30 years or so.

Cocaloch is frustrated because he broke a chair in his college physics class. He's been taking it out on science ever since.

lmao

 

[The Wart]

Man, Cocaloch puttin in work.

Cocaloch is frustrated because he broke a chair in his college physics class. He's been taking it out on science ever since.

If this is your takeaway you should probably read the thread more carefully.

So again, it's not something science has an existing problem with. Science does not protect theories like sacred cows. That's not an actual problem that needs addressing. Science doesn't need to be told to question it's conclusions. It does already.

a) This whole line of argumentation is not really the issue at hand to begin with, which is the difference between human understanding of a thing and the thing itself. These are different, no matter how good and accurate the human understanding is. b) What you call Science is just a bunch of people doing what we happen to call science. Like all people ever now and forever, we absolutely constantly need to forced to question our conclusions.

 

[daxy]

Edit: not sure why tbh

 

[Cocaloch]

If this is your takeaway you should probably read the thread more carefully.

At least part of that statement is kinda not wrong. We later determined that I wasn't the one that broke the chair though.

 

[The Wart]

At least part of that statement is kinda not wrong. We later determined that I wasn't the one that broke the chair though.

Lol I missed that part of the thread.

 

[KidGalactus]

Scientific facts are never actually facts, and knowing that is actually a pretty important part of being a scientist.

Always seeking, never certain.

 

[plagiarize]

So the problem isn't that we need to remind scientists to remember to incorporate new data, their methodology does that by itself. The problem is we need to get scientists to realize what it means that they do that.

Why is this a problem? Why do we need to get them to realize this? This is what I'm missing I think.

And I don't think science has ownership of the term 'fact', I think they have ownership of what a fact is as far as science is concerned. I'd argue it's the reason why we specify that something is a scientific fact vs just a regular old fact in the first place. But obviously a lot of people use that term differently to scientists.

In science facts are immutable and independent of the observer. By definition. But this just speaks to what a scientific fact is.

In some other fields facts can never be these things.

I don't think that represents an issue within the scientific field. I don't think science can function as well as it does, if it isn't allowed to separate fact from observer.

 

[ken_matthews]

No, but this centers on epistemological notion of what truth is that frankly I don't want to spend time dealing with at the moment. What I'm saying is that a better way to look at truth is as a scale quantity. Some things are more or less true, and there is value in more truth. But obfuscating that ultimately is a bad thing.



No, that's only correct if things have to just be either true or false. This isn't exactly mind blowing stuff either. I mean this has been floating around as an answer to this problem since at least the Scottish enlightenment, and certainly it's been a common way of thinking for the last 30 years or so.

I am still confused by what you are trying to say. Hume's problem of induction is a problem with induction, not deduction. Certain things have to be true or false; Hume goes through great lengths in his Treaties of Human Nature to differentiate between the two. His argument was about the methodology we largely use to understand the world around us, not that it is necessarily impossible to discover what is true or not. How do you define a threshold for "more or less true"?

 

[Cocaloch]

I'm going to pull back a bit, because I've spent way too much time on this. I do feel the need to reiterate this because it's a key point though.

Historians and philosophers of science don't hate science. Most of us think it's a very good thing. Personally I think the development of a stable community of people that study the natural world based on generally very strong methods that self-critique is one of the greatest achievements in history. We don't study science because we hate it, as a community we generally study science because we love it.

Part of loving it involves us trying to understand it for what it is, what's actually going on. We may even be totally wrong, but this isn't some attack on science. Treating the SSK or whatever like it's fundamentally an attempt to destroy science doesn't help anyone and it's not prone to producing very good arguments.

 

[collige]

Did he rustle your feathers?

Nah, I love Tyson, but he tweets a lot of dumb stuff. Morever, he said this just last month, so he probably should've been able to figure out what the slide meant:

In school, rarely do we learn how data become facts, how facts become knowledge, and how knowledge becomes wisdom.

 

[theinternetman]

In science facts are immutable and independent of the observer. By definition. But this just speaks to what a scientific fact is.

This isn't necessarily true quantum mechanically, but just like every post in this thread, it depends heavily on what you mean by fact.

 

[plagiarize]

I mean, perhaps we shouldn't use the terms theory and fact within science to mean different things to what they mean in common usage, maybe we should have come up with separate words.

Maybe that would spare a lot of people inside and outside the scientific community a lot of grief.

I mean, I get that science is built on a very specific *presumption*, which is that everything can be explained naturally (vs supernaturally) and that is certainly a social construct. It's been a useful one that has allowed us to find natural explanations for things previously thought to be magical or what have you.

But, I don't think it's an artificial idea to say somethings always happen the same way every time.

And for the record, I've studied both science and the history of it, and find both topics incredibly stimulating. I think the history of science should be required as part of any post high school scientific study. Modern science itself has changed so much, without getting into how much our scientific understanding has changed.

 

[terrdactycalsrock]

But even Popper is comparatively conservative in his metaphysics, and will tell you that how we understand those facts doesn't necessarily have any absolute quality to it. You assume that water will always boil at 100°, but not being omnipotent you don't actually know that it always will. Humans are forced to use inductive reasoning for the sake of functional utility.

This is very true, and thats why I like this theory so much. It doesnt have to be true 100 percent of the time. Theres no way to know that water will always boil at 100 degrees C. Its true enough that we can apply that knowledge in real-world use cases. When we cant we have to make adjustments.

 

[ken_matthews]

I'm going to pull back a bit, because I've spent way too much time on this. I do feel the need to reiterate this because it's a key point though.

Historians and philosophers of science don't hate science. Most of us think it's a very good thing. Personally I think the development of a stable community of people that study the natural world based on generally very strong methods that self-critique is one of the greatest achievements in history. We don't study science because we hate it, as a community we generally study science because we love it.

Part of loving it involves us trying to understand it for what it is, what's actually going on. We may even be totally wrong, but this isn't some attack on science. Treating the SSK or whatever like it's fundamentally an attempt to destroy science doesn't help anyone and it's not prone to producing very good arguments.

Consider this: no amount of new "scientific facts", discoveries, new theories, new experimental methodologies, reformulation of social constructs, or anything short of pure magic or acts of God will prevent the construction of a smart phone going forward. All it will ever take is the engineering knowledge and resources. That tells us that induction is more than utility; we are actually discovering things that say something true about reality.

 

[plagiarize]

This is very true, and thats why I like this theory so much. It doesnt have to be true 100 percent of the time. Theres no way to know that water will always boil at 100 degrees C. Its true enough that we can apply that knowledge in real-world use cases. When we cant we have to make adjustments.

It will always boil at that temperature. It's as true as a statement can be.

Why even have the concept of truth if we can't say anything is true? I just don't see the value of such a definition.

Any definition of truth that means nothing can be 100% true is a social construct.

And a completely useless one at that.

If there's no way of knowing that water boils at a consistent temperature, there's no way of knowing anything. It's rhetorically sound, but valueless, socially.

 

[Epsilon-delta]

I think it's absolutely subjective in every way. We make up some axioms and definitions and then proceed based on them. There are arguments against this understanding of math that I think are at least somewhat valid, but dismissing this out of hand is a joke. Formalism isn't exactly some harebrained conspiracy.

This is of course ignoring what I was actually saying there, which is that the concept 2+2=4 would end up being culturally constructed because we would be making it from within a cultural framework that shapes our understanding of each of the concepts involved.

Formalism is not some harebrained conspiracy, but Godel punched a hole in it. Going by his incompleteness theorems, basic arithmetic under Peano axioms can never be consistent nor complete.

In a nutshell, he proved there will always be mathematical statements that are true (going back to basic arithmetic) that are also unprovable in its own axiomatic system.

Which is why Godel jumped on mathematical realism: mathematical objects exist in the real world and these objects are independent of any rational agent. That these mathematical objects are true regardless of whether you believe it or not and not just "axiomatically true."

You'll find plenty of mathematicians who subscribe to mathematical realism as you would for formalism. It might be even be more for mathematical realism imo.

 

[The Wart]

In science facts are immutable and independent of the observer. By definition. But this just speaks to what a scientific fact is.

If this was what "scientific fact" meant, then nothing anyone ever says could be considered a "scientific fact" because we will never have direct access to objective reality. So I really don't think that's what most people mean when they use the term, because they use the term to refer to claims like "vaccines work" or "global warming is manmade" or "there are only two genders" (note that I am not equating the validity of these statements).

Scientific facts are human conceptualizations of objective reality. They are not objective reality itself. I think you are using a definition that is not actually what laypeople or scientists have in mind.

Why even have the concept of truth if we can't say anything is true? I just don't see the value of such a definition.

As a scientist, the value to me is precisely that it reminds us to be humble, and that we and our field are just as susceptible to every human fault as any other.

 

[And_Gignac]

Scientific claims were used to justify a lot of shit, specially white supremacy. So yeah, when they deal with culture, society, psychology or anything that has to do with subjectivity, scientific facts can be social constructions.

I mean, I dont think anybody is arguing that physics are a social construct.

Science + object = Fact
Science + subject = Social Construct.

If this was what "scientific fact" meant, then nothing anyone ever says could be considered a "scientific fact" because we will never have direct access to objective reality. So I really don't think that's what most people mean when they use the term, because they use the term to refer to claims like "vaccines work" or "global warming is manmade" or "there are only two genders" (note that I am not equating the validity of these statements).

Scientific facts are human conceptualizations of objective reality. They are not objective reality itself. I think you are using a definition that is not actually what laypeople or scientists have in mind.

All of this. Science requires language to be deployed, conceptualized. Science is inescapably crossed by human subjectivity from its very conception.

 

[FullMetalx117]

Science is great because it's practical and we use it in our everyday lives to advance our species and enhance productivity.

But I'm in the camp that believes "science" has it's limits. It's limited by human perception. What our brains are capable of processing. I personally don't think science holds all fundamental truths, where humans come from, reasons for existing, etc. For example the big bang. Based on science and observations we can conclude that the Big Bang is what started our universe. But again that's what us little humans are only capable of observing and perceiving. And this oftentimes leads to human arrogance. "No there's no way that's right (religious books, other theories, etc.), there is no evidence so you're completely wrong." How can we know something for sure by knowing that as humans there's stuff out there that our brains are not capable of comprehending?

Science is extremely useful but at the same time it's important to remember that science as we know it is completely based on human perspective and I'm not sure if it will ever lead to ultimate truths.

 

[plagiarize]

If this was what "scientific fact" meant, then nothing anyone ever says could be considered a "scientific fact" because we will never have direct access to objective reality. So I really don't think that's what most people mean when they use the term, because they use the term to refer to claims like "vaccines work" or "global warming is manmade" or "there are only two genders" (note that I am not equating the validity of these statements).

Scientific facts are human conceptualizations of objective reality. They are not objective reality itself. I think you are using a definition that is not actually what laypeople or scientists have in mind.

I've been clear about that. You're right about what *most people* mean when they use the term, and I don't remotely question that that understanding of the term is a social construct, but what it means to a scientist is by definition not a social construct, which is why you get people like Tyson responding as he does.

He's responding to a term he sees professionally regularly, as if it was meant to mean that same thing. Which is understandable.

The notion that we can't call anything a scientific fact is useless. Science, as I've acknowledged is literally founded on some pretty major presumptions. Without them it wouldn't work. So challenging those presumptions is always going to get push back.

If you think my idea of what a scientific fact is, is off base, I invite you to talk to other scientists. Ask them what a scientific fact is, and I'm confident you'll get similar answers to my own. Things which are observable, repeatable and falsifiable. Things which are true about the natural world, that we have learnt are true. Not truths we have concocted. Facts we have discovered.

 

[The Wart]

I mean, I dont think anybody is arguing that physics are a social construct.

Er, the field physics is absolutely a social construct, if only because all physicists are humans who live in a society. It is an incredibly useful social construct with very, very good predictive accuracy, but nonetheless. Don't fall into the trap of thinking "social construct" equals "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "not based on evidence".

 

[plagiarize]

Science is great because it's practical and we use it in our everyday lives to advance our species and enhance productivity.

But I'm in the camp that believes "science" has it's limits. It's limited by human perception. What our brains are capable of processing. I personally don't think science holds all fundamental truths, where humans come from, reasons for existing, etc. For example the big bang. Based on science and observations we can conclude that the Big Bang is what started our universe. But again that's what us little humans are only capable of observing and perceiving. And this oftentimes leads to human arrogance. "No there's no way that's right (religious books, other theories, etc.), there is no evidence so you're completely wrong." How can we know something for sure by knowing that as humans there's stuff out there that our brains are not capable of comprehending?

Science is extremely useful but at the same time it's important to remember that science as we know it is completely based on human perspective and I'm not sure if it will ever lead to ultimate truths.

Science doesn't try to answer those kinds of questions. When people use science to justify a non belief in the supernatural... those people don't understand science if you ask me. Science doesn't concern itself with the things that cannot be perceived. That isn't to say there isn't value in asking those other questions.

Science starts with the presumption that there is nothing supernatural. You don't have to actually believe that the supernatural doesn't exist to be a scientist...

But since it starts with that presumption, it can't be used to prove the supernatural isn't real. And if it ever proves that, say, ghosts exist in some shape or form, it could only do so, if ghosts aren't actually supernatural at all, just made possible by some hitherto not understood natural phenomena.

Even within the natural universe there is so much we don't understand and likely never will. That's why I think science should continue to not concern itself with disproving the supernatural. There's more than enough natural to figure out.

 

[TakeItSlowDude]

Oh that's sad, so it's just scientism.

Meh. I am not closing the door to other types of knowledge for practical reasons/domain applicability, though I am creating a hierarchy, perhaps this is a weak form of scientism. I fail to see how it is unreasonable to form a hierarchy of knowledge based upon how that knowledge is produced. It would be far sadder to me to not make such discernments and abdicate my agency to avoid being called a philistine or a follower of scientism.

Meanwhile, it doesn't open the door to people dismissing it. What it does do is place science in it's proper place. There are social reasons we should trust science. We don't trust it because it's true in some abstract sense, but because it's a community of experts who use a methodology which is quite good at producing accurate results. People aren't denying Science because of the SSK, and turning science into a golden cow is just as incorrect as dismissing it out of hand because it's socially constructed.

People use the social construct argument to dismiss science when it collides their interests, norms, or values. In my own field I have seen environmental activists, many holding deep ecology like philosophies, put up major roadblocks to energy strategies which could have significantly cut GHG emissions because they rejected such solutions as mere techno-fixes and dismissed even the most rudimentary energy analyses because they claimed such analysis are the products of a techno-culture. Arguments with significant scientific backing on contentious issues in anthropology, psychology, genetics, and many other fields have been dismissed or avoided because those arguments clash against the norms and held beliefs of people in those fields. It is one thing to say such arguments are unpersuasive or to be skeptical of scientists or skeptical of science with limited amounts of research, but it is another thing when people claim the science can be dismissed because it is a cultural product than is merely reproducing the latent biases of the culture it is produced in.

They seek fundamentally different kinds of knowledge and truth that require fundamentally different kinds of claims. Moreover this makes little sense as science is supposed to receive it's epistemological legitimacy from the arts. How is it being propped up by something less legitimate than itself?

Only a section of philosophy makes an effort at legitimizing science through philosophical arguments, so only that small sliver of philosophy could be considered at the same level or a higher level of legitimacy. This legitimacy is not spread to other fields in arts or philosophy through some field association, only fields which are dependent on the same axioms would share the same level of legitimacy.

Also you are assuming that the legitimacy of science can only be established on intellectual grounds. Legitimacy can also be established on pragmatic grounds and from direct experience.

 

[plagiarize]

Er, the field physics is absolutely a social construct, if only because all physicists are humans who live in a society. It is an incredibly useful social construct with very, very good predictive accuracy, but nonetheless. Don't fall into the trap of thinking "social construct" equals "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "not based on evidence".

Again you're using different terms.

He's not talking about the field of physics, but what that field studies.

That it chooses to focus its study on those specific things: social construct.

Those specific things: not social constructs.

 

[The Wart]

If you think my idea of what a scientific fact is, is off base, I invite you to talk to other scientists. Ask them what a scientific fact is, and I'm confident you'll get similar answers to my own. Things which are observable, repeatable and falsifiable. Things which are true about the natural world, that we have learnt are true. Not truths we have concocted. Facts we have discovered.

I am a scientist, and most scientists I know either agree with me or haven't actually thought about the issue. And in any case you're missing the point. A phenomenon can be observable and repeatable by many different observers (falsifiable doesn't really fit in here, and it is impossible to prove absolutely that something is totally independent of the observer), and the human conceptualization of what the phenomenon is, what it means, the theory it supports or falsifies, is still a social construct. It is still not the underlying phenomenon itself. You can think of it as collaborative storytelling with the world.

You seem to think this is somehow derogatory. It isn't. Conceptualizations achieved through science have great predictive accuracy and utility.

Again you're using different terms.

He's not talking about the field of physics, but what that field studies.

That it chooses to focus its study on those specific things: social construct.

Those specific things: not social constructs.

I'll cede this one, with the caveat that the notion of "physics" as distinct set of phenomenon to be studied separate from other phenomena is also a social construct!

 

[Gamegeneral]

That is an irresponsible headline to whatever thing they're presenting.

Can scientific facts be used to spin a narrative? Yes they can. Does a fact stop being true without society? No. No it doesn't.

 

[Moral Panic]

Depends on the context of the sentence but I'd naturally agree that what we consider "Scientific Facts" is a social constructs. Just because something is true doesn't make it a scientific fact, and just because something is considered a "Scientific Fact" doesn't mean it is always 100% true. The things that we decide are "Scientific facts" are decided by society and the acceptance of the community therefore by definition it is a social construct. Papers can have results that are forged, people who claimed they were able to reproduce can lie and something can easily be accepted as a "Scientific fact" for years before the deception is uncovered.

 

[Yoshi]

Whenever someone in the hard sciences gets too big of an ego, it can be fun to remind them the soft sciences are dealing with massively more difficult problems.

If you accept theoretical computer science as hard science, there you deal with undecidable problems a lot, because verifying even simple properties of software is undecidable (so it is actually an important topic even outside of just diagnosing something is undecidable. So how could anything be a more difficult problem (don't say not semidecidable, of course not semidecidable problems are of interest for computer science as well)?

As a hard scientist myself (math & cs), you may deem me biased in saying that hard sciences have one reason to be "cocky" over soft sciences in that the theorems in hard sciences are absolute truths (modern mathematics), describe reality in a clearly refutable way (physics) or at the very least can be proven to have a statistically relevant effect (medicine).

Soft sciences deal with quite complex systems that currently make it impossible to generate results of a comparable quality. Many fields, e.g. gender studies, are influenced by political and societal circumstances and the political views of the researchers has a direct influence on the results in ways that make clear that the methodology needs reinement. I feel that social sciences will need to evolve in a similar way as math has, described on the last few pages, to really be able to reliably yield verifiable results. Authority's arguments are still being used in spades, which is even observable by the way teaching is handled, where learning names of researchers and the point of time they made a claim actually plays a significant role. I feel that as social sciences mature - and I acknowledge that finding rigorous methodologies for sociel sciences is an amazingly challenging endeavour - the historcial and authorative style of debate will lose importance.

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

This kind of statement is designed to get you to think and it's kinda true. What we consider scientific fact are based on consensus based on observation and experiment. That's a social construct.

This. I'm going to give the class the benefit of the doubt and assume that this statement was fleshed out and given context by the rest of the lecture. Not just that the prof dropped "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted" and peaced out.

 

[Timeaisis]

Just to note 2+2=4 I'm pretty sure is merely an expression of the mathematical proof 2x+2x=4x which as a mathematical proof isn't subjective nor mutable and one is either correct or incorrect in expressing it and indeed is the kind of proof that remains the same irrespective of any social construct or observation.

True, I was just using it as example.

My favorite example of potential scientific relativity is how humans perceive color. We've socially accepted that the color "green" constitutes green, but even without the words, we'd be able to differentiate between colors and classify them, albeit we'd only be using our own learned conceptions of what a certain color is, because you can't "learn" colors, you can only learn the words everyone else uses for colors.

If you were sitting in a cave without language and never having come into contact without another human I doubt you would create the concept of 2+2=4 that we have. Even if you would come up with something similar on your own because their is a reality to which we refer in creating ideas.

Of course your hypothetical doesn't exist, and doesn't say anything about the conception of 2+2=4 which we currently have, which was created by people using words, and which is clearly embedded in society. The fact that some mythical lonely person in the state of nature could come up with a similar idea doesn't mean the idea we have now wasn't created socially.

That's true, but we are arguing about communication now. Math is pretty much just a language at this point, and without that language, we couldn't describe "2+2 = 4", but an individual could still, ostensibly, come to that conclusion themselves. That was my point. The social aspect is only for communication. And individual can still divine certain scientific and mathematical "facts" by their lonesome, theoretically.

The cave analogy, of course, "one" rock plus "one" rock equals "two" rocks. But of course, it's really hard to have this argument without utilizing the language we've learned to refer to "one" and "two", but I'd argue the concepts still exist even without them.

 

[exYle]

I'm going to pull back a bit, because I've spent way too much time on this. I do feel the need to reiterate this because it's a key point though.

You did a good job, man. I learned a lot reading your posts.

 

[petghost]

True, I was just using it as example.

My favorite example of potential scientific relativity is how humans perceive color. We've socially accepted that the color "green" constitutes green, but even without the words, we'd be able to differentiate between them, albeit we are only using our own learned conceptions of what a certain color is, because you can't "learn" colors, you can only learn the words everyone else uses for colors.

i dont really get this because green is a wavelength (apparently with a frequency of 526-606 THz) so it exists in objective reality even if we cant communicate the sensational understanding of the color green to each other. even if your perception of green is my perception of purple we are talking about the same thing.

things can still exist outside of human perception of them

 

[ken_matthews]

True, I was just using it as example.

My favorite example of potential scientific relativity is how humans perceive color. We've socially accepted that the color "green" constitutes green, but even without the words, we'd be able to differentiate between them, albeit we are only using our own learned conceptions of what a certain color is, because you can't "learn" colors, you can only learn the words everyone else uses for colors.

But you can measure the wave length of the light, and then determine which photo receptors in the retina respond to it. A 500nm light wave is 500nm light wave no matter if we call it "green" or any other name, or how a specific individual's brain interprets it. The electromagnetic spectrum is an objective reality and we have discovered things that are true about it.

EDIT: Petghost beat me by a minute!

 

[Lesath]

But you can measure the wave length of the light, and then determine which photo receptors in the retina respond to it. A 500nm light wave is 500nm light wave no matter if we call it "green" or any other name, or how a specific individual's brain interprets it. The electromagnetic spectrum is an objective reality and we have discovered things that are true about it.

EDIT: Petghost beat me by a minute!

You, in the course of measuring anything, are required to perceive it. A numerical output fancy machine that measures the wavelength of light shone on it is not so different than a photoreceptor inside your eye that activates in the green spectrum. Less precise, perhaps, but can you say with certainty that any machine we have can output the absolute truth?