Comment on Why is science better than the alternative? (And what is that alternative, exactly?)
Izzy@lemmy.world 10 months agoImagine it is a lot time ago and you observe that things fall when you drop them in the air. You want to figure out how fast they are falling. You can either apply some kind of scientific method to do an experiment, record the results and get an answer or you can not do that. Which I wouldn’t count as an alternative to science. It is just the absence of science.
froghorse@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Really. What does science do, exactly?
BitSound@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Science doesn’t “do” anything. It’s not an entity. People use the scientific method to investigate how the universe works. There aren’t really any alternatives.
Say you came across someone claiming that their tonic cured cancer. Why should you trust them? Well, there’s no other option than see if it works (or see if someone else you trust has already done so, preferably with a peer-reviewed, double-blind study and all that). Now you’re using the scientific method.
I mean, I guess you’ve got other options. You can blindly trust them. You can pray to the deity of your choice. You can cast snake bones and interpret how they land. None of these provide actual knowledge though. They’re all just guesses until you try it out, at which point you’re again using the scientific method. That’s why there’s no alternative. If you disagree that those options are just guesses, then prove it. Guess what? You’ll be proving it with the scientific method.
It’s like “alternative medicine”. There’s no such thing. If something works, it’s medicine. If it doesn’t, it’s not.
froghorse@lemm.ee 10 months ago
So science is something we use for getting us knowledge about the universe?
We could call it a tool then. Right?
And it’s better because it delivers higher quality knowledge?
BURN@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The scientific method is founded on creating reproduceable, consistent results to prove a hypothesis.
It delivers consistent knowledge, which is the most important thing.
BitSound@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes
It’s not “better” than other options, and it doesn’t deliver “higher quality” knowledge. It is the only way of obtaining knowledge about our universe. There’s no other option that it’s “better than”, because the other options don’t result in “lower quality” knowledge. They don’t provide any knowledge at all.