Comment on Finish him. šŸŖ“

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yeahiknow3@lemmings.world āØ6ā© āØmonthsā© ago

Iā€™m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of ā€œscienceā€ is fairly new and most people we would think of as ā€œscientistsā€ 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. ā€œScienceā€ doesnā€™t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldnā€™t 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 isnā€™t? 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 (letā€™s 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 ā€œscienceā€ that seem to beā€¦ not about finding the truth at all. But Iā€™m 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: itā€™s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucciā€˜s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isnā€™t 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 isnā€™t as tidy and uncomplicated as ā€œfiguring out the truth.ā€ It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each otherā€™s work and so on and so forth, and itā€™s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isnā€™t ā€œdoing stuff in oneā€™s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results ā€œ

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