yeahiknow3
@yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
Look, here’s my point: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from similar but different activities. The very fact that my efforts to do so have created a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation.” If that’s all that science was, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!
Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word very loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.
What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review is a salient feature present in one group and absent in the other. Do you have a definition?
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” 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. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’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 isn’t? Need counter examples). The royal academy of sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon has pointed out what I just did, that science requires an intellectual community (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — 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 “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’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: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’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 isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results “
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
You should publish your findings and collect your Nobel prize. You’ve solved philosophy.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.
The irony of plebs arguing among themselves over the definition of science without any notion of the preceding centuries of debate is absolutely delicious, btw.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
Your last sentence is muah chef’s kiss.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
Before the 20th century most famous physicists referred to themselves as “natural philosophers,” not scientists. The P in PhD is for philosophy. The word “science” refers to a modern social phenomenon, a sort of peer review methodology that generates shared public knowledge.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you like, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use the word. This is why jargon exists, and perhaps “science” is a bit too colloquial for technical definitions.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
Science is a social activity that human beings engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or being creative, or reasoning. It’s a very specific social method of peer review that serves to generate shared public knowledge.
These are technical terms we have refined over hundreds of years.
- Comment on Finish him. 🪓 4 weeks ago:
Science is strictly a social activity. You can’t have a social activity without the social component.
Trees falling in forests is a natural phenomenon. It’s very different.