Comment on Finish him. šŖ
yeahiknow3@lemmings.world āØ6ā© āØmonthsā© agoIām not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of āscienceā is fairly new and most people we would think of as āscientistsā throughout history, such as Newton, actually thought of themselves as natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. āScienceā doesnāt mean figuring out the truth. That wouldnāt make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isnāt? Need counter examples). The royal academy of sciences was created for that reason, funny enough ā because Francis Bacon has pointed out what I just did, that science requires an intellectual community (letās be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own ā imagine having to invent mathematics from scratch just to do physics).
Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of āscienceā that seem to beā¦ not about finding the truth at all. But Iām guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.
Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: itās very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucciās Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isnāt science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.
Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isnāt as tidy and uncomplicated as āfiguring out the truth.ā It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each otherās work and so on and so forth, and itās different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isnāt ādoing stuff in oneās garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results ā