Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 7472667" data-attributes="member: 6688937">I agree. Fortunately, enough humans can usually agree on the basics to form complex societies and sit around debating this stuff and doing science, etc. Is that subjective? Yup. But we generally agree (enough) on many things that are subjective or matters of taste, this is no different."Prevents" a wild hypothesis? Sure nothing prevents someone from proposing one. But the scientific method is about finding out which ones are false and rejecting them. I mean, hypothesis testing is how science comes closer to objective "truth". As far as the rest goes...Reasoning + evidence approximates science. Remove the evidence part...well philosophy and reason in a vacuum have never proven themselves good at coming up with "truths" about reality, AFAICT. "Consensus Building" by itself? I don't see how that can determine anything non-trivially objective about reality at all (beyond "we all agree X"). That is, until you add the evidence and science part back in.Whoa, okay. A lot going on here. And I think you've poorly-defined some things here, as well as mashed some things together....first off, science can be done by observation, not necessarily experiment. To grossly oversimplify: you need to make predictions that can be falsified by further observation and then go see if you can falsify them. If you don't accept that, then you're throwing out astronomy, paleontology, and I'm sure a few other fields as well."Science is the best tool to discover all truth?" includes the unwarranted assumption that all truth is discoverable. So, at the very least, I would reduce the statement to "Science is the best tool to discover truth." I would also go one step further, given my druthers, and substitute "the nature of reality" for "truth". "Truth" tends to be rather fuzzy in modern English, where we can use it to cover "valid" for an argument as well as "true" for a statement. An argument can be valid without being true. But I digress...I would toss in "objective" as well for "Science is the best tool to discover the nature of objective reality." "Science" is also a bit fuzzy, but I'm content to let it ride on the understanding that we mean "people practicing some form of the scientific method."This would be, I think rather obviously, a question to approach observationally, rather than experimentally. Unless I'm misreading you, it would appear that we both accept that science can discover at least some objective truths about reality. So we don't have to prove that.So, what characteristics can we look for in a human endeavor that we can hypothesize come from its ability to discover objective reality? (Assuming such a reality exists, for you philosophy types.)First off, I submit that, like multiple moths to a single flame, such an endeavor would necessarily be what I call convergent (others might use the term consilient). That is to say, wherever you start, valid methods of determining any objective reality will necessarily tend to converge on a singular description of that reality. Furthermore, endeavors that are better at it will do so faster than those which are worse at it. Science has this property. History didn't have it until science weighed in (and may still not have it, to hear some of my friends in the field talk). Religion?...nope. Philosophy? A little tougher, but I think generally no. The arts?...heavens no, and also "angry orange subtraction" for you Dadaists out there. Politics....no. If anything, most of these endeavors demonstrate divergence in that two groups/traditions starting from the same place end up trying to kill each other over later disagreements. Mathematics...I tend to say, No-ish. Not so much because mathematicians would disagree on the field, but they aren't really trying to create such a model (to my understanding, anyway). To some extent, that describes most of these fields. Now, does that prove that there is no better human endeavor for discovering objective truth? Only to the extent that you accept that I've exhausted all human endeavors and agree with my assessments of them. If science (or math), can't then I don't know what will. At which point, I call into question the "truth" of things that science can't address.   The burden here is on the...what? How do you think...? Hunh? I honestly have no idea what this could mean.You are reversing my argument/intention. I was merely objecting to your claim: "Science is useless for moral, social, ethical, and political issues -- there's nothing to measure, there." If science is totally irrelevant to moral, social, ethical issues, there is never a need for a church to arrest Galileo, there is no reason to object to teaching evolution in schools. As to your question, "are you trying to claim political parties are using science to determine which science research areas to defund?" the cynic in me would bet money that a lot of social science research goes into formulating the opinions and policies of national parties and politicians. We certainly know it goes into electioneering and redistricting efforts. Computers (dependent upon scientific understanding) have permitted many rather famous "brute force" proofs within my lifetime that would have been unthinkable undertakings just a few decades ago. I would include the increased ability to communicate between mathematicians as well. So, yes, science has improved mathematics as a human endeavor.I think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] addressed this nicely.There are many ongoing observations and experiments with primates to examine the origins and nature of human moral sense. I'm also not sure what makes you think the golden rule isn't subjective, or that science couldn't "weigh in on it." Here are a list of questions about the Golden Rule that I think science could take a crack at answering:Why do so many human societies express some approximation of the Golden Rule?Is the Golden Rule (or some approximation) instinctive to humans?If so, to what extent?How did that evolve?What other social species seem to follow a "Golden Rule" similar to humans and what ones don't? - why and how?And yet, so many scientists write philosophy books wherein they disparage philosophy....</blockquote>

Verification