I've stopped reading right here: "I used to be very pro-science." How can someone even be pro-science or anti-science? It's mind-boggling. Like someone can be against or pro gravity.....
The concept of 'science' for me wasn't limited to simply the body of accepted propositions about the world that have been argued for rigorously, which I don't have any issue with. It was more like 'science = body of well-established propositions + community of individuals around it'.
The community I've observed had many times wanted to shoehorn every kind of proposition into becoming an empirical proposition warranting empirical evidence, or it was simply nonsense. The issue I took with this that the underlying attitude is itself a non-empirical proposition, so I couldn't coherently hold this attitude.
As a result, my 'anti-science' was moreso an extreme suspicion of the claims of the community + soft sciences because I thought they'd try to inappropriately use empirical testing where it wasn't warranted. I believe positive psychology is likely one such example, but I haven't yet done any rigorous study of it to be able to claim it definitively.
I'm a junior at university, so I understand I likely don't have very mature views on a lot of things. The objective of the above post was precisely to help me distinguish more sharply between science and the community surrounding it, by not attributing certain assumptions I found to be problematic to science itself but to a part of its community, and thus help me recover the proper place of science.
However, what appeared to be good faith engagement on my part hasn't really been reciprocated. Mostly, I'm either being nailed on not adequately clarifying the subject of my post which commits me to a stronger thesis (that roughly, a substantially large portion of the scientific community does indeed subscribe to the above assumptions) that I have no support for, which I didn't intend to hold, and which I agree with and even clarified further at the start of the post. Or, having the totality of my post dismissed by virtue of the fact that I distinguished between two attitudes towards science (pro- and anti-science).
At least the first one still had some substantial engagement with my points, whereas the latter just seems to infer I'm saying nonsense because of what seems to be an invalid distinction as a result of discordant conceptual constitutions of science. It's unclear to me what the grounds are for that inference.
Then we have some others who think everything written here is AI, which is quite unfortunate since everything I'm writing here is written by hand.
The actual substance of the post has been mostly dismissed, unfortunately. The main objective was to get "an evaluation of whether [these assumptions are] accurate and whether [they] can be extended".
It makes me wonder whether the actual issue here is that I'm opposing a body of assumptions that some do indeed subscribe to as a whole, and just getting knee-jerk rejection as the natural reaction from it.
Can you give an example of: something that is non physical, a meaningful proposition that is neither mathematical or empirical, and a proposition of which the truth value cannot be cognized?
I believe there are two ways to object to universally quantified claims. First is to either provide a concrete counter-example. Second is to argue that the set it's quantified over isn't necessarily complete.
My objection with respect to physicalism and cognitive completeness rest on the latter strategy, rather than providing concrete counterexamples.
Thus, I'm not claiming that "there exists a thing that cannot be reduced to physical matter", but rather questioning whether we have access to "all things" in the first place, which is what is being quantified over in the claim that "all things can be reduced to physical matter". I believe I have no way of knowing if we do indeed have access to all existing things, and thus that my assent to the claim would be unfounded.
It seems to me that some people just assume that "all things", i.e., "what exists" is itself just physical matter. So the claim becomes roughly, "all (physical) things can be reduced to physical matter", which is just tautological. Hence I call it tautological physicalism.
A structurally similar objection exists with respect to the cognitive completeness claim I outlined. I can elaborate on that objection more if you'd like.
With respect to meaningful propositions that are neither mathematical nor empirical, first, note the three assumptions I've outlined themselves. I believe neither of them are mathematical nor empirical, yet meaningful, and aren't warranting of empirical evidence. See others below:
I exist
Humans exist
Feelings exist
Emotions exist
Humans can act
Action requires resources appropriate to that action
ex., physically moving requires a body, changing where I'm looking requires eyes, thinking requires thoughts, etc
Feelings require perception
This body central to experience is experienced as mine
This laptop I'm writing on is mine
No physical thing can present all its sides all at once
... and a lot more, that I can't think of off the top of my head
My idea of empirical evidence is evidence that is derived from the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and sophisticated methods built on top of these fundamentals. I believe all the propositions above are true, but cannot be demonstrated empirically.
Consider 1. I cannot, by any of the senses, see an 'I'. There's only 'this body' which has these senses, that experiences these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts. I see no means by which 'I' can be shown to exist empirically.
Consider 2. A similar argument applies. When I look at others who I take to be humans, I don't, by any of the senses, sense the property of 'humanness'. I just see and hear a body that moves on its own, and looks alike to 'this body'. The notion that humans exist would be a notion derived entirely non-empirically. Now I suppose someone could hypothetically argue from some sophisticated brain scans that this body is indicative of this body being a human, but that would require them to first have the notion that certain brain activity implies humanness. That proposition (that "X brain activity implies this body is human") can only be derived from an actually existing human, which is precisely what is in question here. So it would just beg the claim.
From these, all ethical claims are also negated without even a consideration of whether 'intrinsically good' and 'intrinsically bad' can be cognized empirically (they can't). Thus, a holder of positivism should have no ethical commitments. This means, for the sake of consistency, they should abstain from any complaints about people doing anything wrong to them. Because people cannot be shown to exist, empirically. This is obviously problematic and so I can't commit to it.
Consider claims 8 & 9. I call these ownership claims. I see no way of demonstrating them empirically. Where do I see 'mineness' by the senses? By what method? Unless we want to argue it's a purely judicial concept. So, out of consistency, people ought not to commit to claims of the kind "this person is my child/husband/wife/friend" because it cannot be verified empirically. The claim wouldn't even require predication to be false, since the subject, the people, can't be shown to exist empirically.
Consider claim 10. I can see as clearly as the fact that "2 + 2 = 4" that a physical thing cannot present all its sides all at once.
I can elaborate on all other claims, but that would get rather tedious. Positivism implies not holding any of the claims from 1 - 10. I'm unwilling to do that, so I can't hold the positivist position. There has to be a source of knowledge that isn't just synthetic a posteriori. I believe I can find that in the synthetic a priori as found in the Husserlian tradition. See the Husserl scholar Barry Smith's arguments for the synthetic a priori in this paper.
For people arguing that claims 1 - 10 are just "common sense", I would ask them to provide a rigorous account of "common sense". Because a lot of things are common sense to a lot of people, ex., the existence of an omniscient, omnipresent God. On what grounds are they then to reject those beliefs?
Or, are they willing to be consistent and thus also regard those such beliefs as "common sense" and accept them as well?
These assumptions seem uniformly unwarranted. To start with the first, the scientific method does not involve any assumption that “all things can be ‘reduced’ to physical matter.” By recognizing how impressionistically and imprecise your treatment of ‘science’, you’ll be more well equipped to conduct a calibrated sociological, methodical or philosophical analysis. As things stand with this post, however, I can’t go past the first positing.
None of the claims here are with respect to the scientific method itself.
I agree that a more accurate analysis of the scientific community would require methodological considerations that are absent in the above post. I should've qualified the subject of my claim.
I was also not intending to claim that all or a specific subset of scientists hold these assumptions. So that's a mistake on my part since the post seems to imply that in a sense. I was trying to reverse engineer the assumptions of the scientifically-inclined people I've personally engaged with and have seen online. Even in that regard, I recognie that the attempt at reverse engineering could be inaccurate because the holders could hold weaker variants of these positions. That said, it often seems they don't.
I was trying to see whether these assumptions concorded with other members here, and whether there are any other to be aware of, and whether any holders of these positions can justify them.
I think your claim might be perfectly legitimate with respect to particular individuals in the scientific community and scientifically-inclined people. But lilely not about science as a whole in the abstract. A lot of people in 'science' are not very intellectually sophisticated. In fact, most of them are just functionaries who learned to apply a series of procedures and have only cursory engagement with the deeper assumptions. Which is why I see it as perfectly realistic that many would hold those assumptions, mostly unreflectively.
Would you know of any studies that perhaps attempt to study such assumptions of actual scientists? I'd be very interested in extracting more if possible.
Are there any resources you can recommend to help me distinguish more sharply between science and scientists/people around science?
I've also observd a significant personification of science by many people ("the latest science says ...", as if science itself speaks), where it's almost like an omniscient entity that always speaks the truth. I would take this personification as another assumption, but not one I've encountered very strongly amongst scientists themselves, but rather just people who've been bought up in a scientiifc culture.
All these little assumptions never sat well with me and I ended up distancing myself from science as a whole because I assumed it to be equivalent with the community surrounding it.
>All these assumptions never sat well with me and I ended up distancing myself from science as a whole
This is not rational behaviour. Whether or not 1, 2, or 3 hold, General Relativity does a damned good job of predicting the motions of stars in space, Maxwell’s equations do a damn good job of giving engineers the understanding required to build iPhones, atomic theory does a damned good job of helping you figure out what will be a useful replacement for sodium lauryl sulfate in your shampoo.
I believe what OP means is the conflation of ‘scientific endeavor’ with the layperson’s use of it as if this omniscient being led to distancing from this skewed conception of it. OP is not at odds with the scientific method.
People that you’ve “personally engaged” with online… in what way are they representative of “scientists”, which is the term you use in your post title for the population you’re addressing in your post?
If you want to talk about philosophy of science, you’ve got to more carefully establish your subject and your concerns or questions. We’re mixing armchair sociology, first-person interactions, ill-defined or pop notions of the ‘scientific method’…
I feel embarrassed responding to this post, because it is probably AI-generated.
Science (hard science, not political science, etc.) deals with explanations of physical ("material") things and phenomena, and in that realm all things are mathematical or empirical, etc. etc. Other things that are based on opinions and feelings and lots and lots of words are outside the domain of rigorous science.
"Physical matter" composes 9% of the known universe. Also E=MC^(2). Matter is less important than you think.
The goal of science is to make accurate predictions which can be tested. The predictions don't necessarily need to have any equations and they can be theoretical. For example, the prediction that photons are quantized.
These predictions must be testable. In testing, there must be a true or false value. Therefore, yes; the truth value must be cognized, otherwise your prediction isn't science.
One big problem I have with this critique is that you seem to have science confused with "The Science" (as in "I trust The Science"), which is a strictly mythical entity
Not that it isn't real, or even that it's not related to the small-a science that scientists do, but they exist on completely different planes -- criticizing a myth is never going to be effective, and it kind of misses the most interesting questions, namely why the myth exists at all and what it means and does for the people who invoke it
(I see the same fundamental misunderstanding in the argument over evolution, which seems obviously a mythical and not an epistemological dispute, which is why it seems so intractable but also so satisfying for a lot of people)
I'm sorry that probably sounds insane but I really can't develop it any further right now because I was hoping to play some Minecraft before I go to bed
I agree. Physicalism seems to be the default (and unexamined) philosophical position of most scientists in and outside academia. It has enticed many philosophers too. I prefer to think of it in Zubirian terms (a Husserl disciple btw), reality is always “more”, and by reducing everything to the physical we neglect the metaphysical. Science, with their very refined although often flawed methods, which are always in progress, can only explain so far. That’s why many scientists who venture into philosophy end up adopting very naïf empiricist, logicist and positivist views.
Of course one sets the “metaphysical” apart from the measurable, if one is doing science. It’s rather hard to investigate or understand a phenomenon if it’s not sufficiently well-defined or sufficiently endurant to permit definition. It’s almost as if one has moved beyond science to speculation…
NVByatt | 17 hours ago
I've stopped reading right here: "I used to be very pro-science." How can someone even be pro-science or anti-science? It's mind-boggling. Like someone can be against or pro gravity.....
Poh211 | 15 hours ago
You either like a system of knowledge or not… that’s it!
[OP] tejveeer | 8 hours ago
The concept of 'science' for me wasn't limited to simply the body of accepted propositions about the world that have been argued for rigorously, which I don't have any issue with. It was more like 'science = body of well-established propositions + community of individuals around it'.
The community I've observed had many times wanted to shoehorn every kind of proposition into becoming an empirical proposition warranting empirical evidence, or it was simply nonsense. The issue I took with this that the underlying attitude is itself a non-empirical proposition, so I couldn't coherently hold this attitude.
As a result, my 'anti-science' was moreso an extreme suspicion of the claims of the community + soft sciences because I thought they'd try to inappropriately use empirical testing where it wasn't warranted. I believe positive psychology is likely one such example, but I haven't yet done any rigorous study of it to be able to claim it definitively.
I'm a junior at university, so I understand I likely don't have very mature views on a lot of things. The objective of the above post was precisely to help me distinguish more sharply between science and the community surrounding it, by not attributing certain assumptions I found to be problematic to science itself but to a part of its community, and thus help me recover the proper place of science.
However, what appeared to be good faith engagement on my part hasn't really been reciprocated. Mostly, I'm either being nailed on not adequately clarifying the subject of my post which commits me to a stronger thesis (that roughly, a substantially large portion of the scientific community does indeed subscribe to the above assumptions) that I have no support for, which I didn't intend to hold, and which I agree with and even clarified further at the start of the post. Or, having the totality of my post dismissed by virtue of the fact that I distinguished between two attitudes towards science (pro- and anti-science).
At least the first one still had some substantial engagement with my points, whereas the latter just seems to infer I'm saying nonsense because of what seems to be an invalid distinction as a result of discordant conceptual constitutions of science. It's unclear to me what the grounds are for that inference.
Then we have some others who think everything written here is AI, which is quite unfortunate since everything I'm writing here is written by hand.
The actual substance of the post has been mostly dismissed, unfortunately. The main objective was to get "an evaluation of whether [these assumptions are] accurate and whether [they] can be extended".
It makes me wonder whether the actual issue here is that I'm opposing a body of assumptions that some do indeed subscribe to as a whole, and just getting knee-jerk rejection as the natural reaction from it.
LeKebabFrancais | 14 hours ago
Can you give an example of: something that is non physical, a meaningful proposition that is neither mathematical or empirical, and a proposition of which the truth value cannot be cognized?
[OP] tejveeer | 7 hours ago
Thanks for the response.
I believe there are two ways to object to universally quantified claims. First is to either provide a concrete counter-example. Second is to argue that the set it's quantified over isn't necessarily complete.
My objection with respect to physicalism and cognitive completeness rest on the latter strategy, rather than providing concrete counterexamples.
Thus, I'm not claiming that "there exists a thing that cannot be reduced to physical matter", but rather questioning whether we have access to "all things" in the first place, which is what is being quantified over in the claim that "all things can be reduced to physical matter". I believe I have no way of knowing if we do indeed have access to all existing things, and thus that my assent to the claim would be unfounded.
It seems to me that some people just assume that "all things", i.e., "what exists" is itself just physical matter. So the claim becomes roughly, "all (physical) things can be reduced to physical matter", which is just tautological. Hence I call it tautological physicalism.
A structurally similar objection exists with respect to the cognitive completeness claim I outlined. I can elaborate on that objection more if you'd like.
With respect to meaningful propositions that are neither mathematical nor empirical, first, note the three assumptions I've outlined themselves. I believe neither of them are mathematical nor empirical, yet meaningful, and aren't warranting of empirical evidence. See others below:
My idea of empirical evidence is evidence that is derived from the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and sophisticated methods built on top of these fundamentals. I believe all the propositions above are true, but cannot be demonstrated empirically.
Consider 1. I cannot, by any of the senses, see an 'I'. There's only 'this body' which has these senses, that experiences these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts. I see no means by which 'I' can be shown to exist empirically.
Consider 2. A similar argument applies. When I look at others who I take to be humans, I don't, by any of the senses, sense the property of 'humanness'. I just see and hear a body that moves on its own, and looks alike to 'this body'. The notion that humans exist would be a notion derived entirely non-empirically. Now I suppose someone could hypothetically argue from some sophisticated brain scans that this body is indicative of this body being a human, but that would require them to first have the notion that certain brain activity implies humanness. That proposition (that "X brain activity implies this body is human") can only be derived from an actually existing human, which is precisely what is in question here. So it would just beg the claim.
From these, all ethical claims are also negated without even a consideration of whether 'intrinsically good' and 'intrinsically bad' can be cognized empirically (they can't). Thus, a holder of positivism should have no ethical commitments. This means, for the sake of consistency, they should abstain from any complaints about people doing anything wrong to them. Because people cannot be shown to exist, empirically. This is obviously problematic and so I can't commit to it.
Consider claims 8 & 9. I call these ownership claims. I see no way of demonstrating them empirically. Where do I see 'mineness' by the senses? By what method? Unless we want to argue it's a purely judicial concept. So, out of consistency, people ought not to commit to claims of the kind "this person is my child/husband/wife/friend" because it cannot be verified empirically. The claim wouldn't even require predication to be false, since the subject, the people, can't be shown to exist empirically.
Consider claim 10. I can see as clearly as the fact that "2 + 2 = 4" that a physical thing cannot present all its sides all at once.
[OP] tejveeer | 7 hours ago
I can elaborate on all other claims, but that would get rather tedious. Positivism implies not holding any of the claims from 1 - 10. I'm unwilling to do that, so I can't hold the positivist position. There has to be a source of knowledge that isn't just synthetic a posteriori. I believe I can find that in the synthetic a priori as found in the Husserlian tradition. See the Husserl scholar Barry Smith's arguments for the synthetic a priori in this paper.
For people arguing that claims 1 - 10 are just "common sense", I would ask them to provide a rigorous account of "common sense". Because a lot of things are common sense to a lot of people, ex., the existence of an omniscient, omnipresent God. On what grounds are they then to reject those beliefs?
Or, are they willing to be consistent and thus also regard those such beliefs as "common sense" and accept them as well?
knockingatthegate | 18 hours ago
These assumptions seem uniformly unwarranted. To start with the first, the scientific method does not involve any assumption that “all things can be ‘reduced’ to physical matter.” By recognizing how impressionistically and imprecise your treatment of ‘science’, you’ll be more well equipped to conduct a calibrated sociological, methodical or philosophical analysis. As things stand with this post, however, I can’t go past the first positing.
[OP] tejveeer | 18 hours ago
None of the claims here are with respect to the scientific method itself.
I agree that a more accurate analysis of the scientific community would require methodological considerations that are absent in the above post. I should've qualified the subject of my claim.
I was also not intending to claim that all or a specific subset of scientists hold these assumptions. So that's a mistake on my part since the post seems to imply that in a sense. I was trying to reverse engineer the assumptions of the scientifically-inclined people I've personally engaged with and have seen online. Even in that regard, I recognie that the attempt at reverse engineering could be inaccurate because the holders could hold weaker variants of these positions. That said, it often seems they don't.
I was trying to see whether these assumptions concorded with other members here, and whether there are any other to be aware of, and whether any holders of these positions can justify them.
seldomtimely | 17 hours ago
I think your claim might be perfectly legitimate with respect to particular individuals in the scientific community and scientifically-inclined people. But lilely not about science as a whole in the abstract. A lot of people in 'science' are not very intellectually sophisticated. In fact, most of them are just functionaries who learned to apply a series of procedures and have only cursory engagement with the deeper assumptions. Which is why I see it as perfectly realistic that many would hold those assumptions, mostly unreflectively.
[OP] tejveeer | 17 hours ago
Thank you for the response.
Would you know of any studies that perhaps attempt to study such assumptions of actual scientists? I'd be very interested in extracting more if possible.
Are there any resources you can recommend to help me distinguish more sharply between science and scientists/people around science?
I've also observd a significant personification of science by many people ("the latest science says ...", as if science itself speaks), where it's almost like an omniscient entity that always speaks the truth. I would take this personification as another assumption, but not one I've encountered very strongly amongst scientists themselves, but rather just people who've been bought up in a scientiifc culture.
All these little assumptions never sat well with me and I ended up distancing myself from science as a whole because I assumed it to be equivalent with the community surrounding it.
EnvironmentalDog- | 17 hours ago
>All these assumptions never sat well with me and I ended up distancing myself from science as a whole
This is not rational behaviour. Whether or not 1, 2, or 3 hold, General Relativity does a damned good job of predicting the motions of stars in space, Maxwell’s equations do a damn good job of giving engineers the understanding required to build iPhones, atomic theory does a damned good job of helping you figure out what will be a useful replacement for sodium lauryl sulfate in your shampoo.
suppoe2056 | 16 hours ago
I believe what OP means is the conflation of ‘scientific endeavor’ with the layperson’s use of it as if this omniscient being led to distancing from this skewed conception of it. OP is not at odds with the scientific method.
knockingatthegate | 11 hours ago
People that you’ve “personally engaged” with online… in what way are they representative of “scientists”, which is the term you use in your post title for the population you’re addressing in your post?
If you want to talk about philosophy of science, you’ve got to more carefully establish your subject and your concerns or questions. We’re mixing armchair sociology, first-person interactions, ill-defined or pop notions of the ‘scientific method’…
Have you spent any time with the SEP website?
SeeBuyFly3 | 17 hours ago
I feel embarrassed responding to this post, because it is probably AI-generated.
Science (hard science, not political science, etc.) deals with explanations of physical ("material") things and phenomena, and in that realm all things are mathematical or empirical, etc. etc. Other things that are based on opinions and feelings and lots and lots of words are outside the domain of rigorous science.
Anxious-Sign-3587 | 18 hours ago
Which scientists?
FlyingFlipPhone | 15 hours ago
"Physical matter" composes 9% of the known universe. Also E=MC^(2). Matter is less important than you think.
The goal of science is to make accurate predictions which can be tested. The predictions don't necessarily need to have any equations and they can be theoretical. For example, the prediction that photons are quantized.
These predictions must be testable. In testing, there must be a true or false value. Therefore, yes; the truth value must be cognized, otherwise your prediction isn't science.
West_Economist6673 | 15 hours ago
One big problem I have with this critique is that you seem to have science confused with "The Science" (as in "I trust The Science"), which is a strictly mythical entity
Not that it isn't real, or even that it's not related to the small-a science that scientists do, but they exist on completely different planes -- criticizing a myth is never going to be effective, and it kind of misses the most interesting questions, namely why the myth exists at all and what it means and does for the people who invoke it
(I see the same fundamental misunderstanding in the argument over evolution, which seems obviously a mythical and not an epistemological dispute, which is why it seems so intractable but also so satisfying for a lot of people)
I'm sorry that probably sounds insane but I really can't develop it any further right now because I was hoping to play some Minecraft before I go to bed
raskolnicope | 17 hours ago
I agree. Physicalism seems to be the default (and unexamined) philosophical position of most scientists in and outside academia. It has enticed many philosophers too. I prefer to think of it in Zubirian terms (a Husserl disciple btw), reality is always “more”, and by reducing everything to the physical we neglect the metaphysical. Science, with their very refined although often flawed methods, which are always in progress, can only explain so far. That’s why many scientists who venture into philosophy end up adopting very naïf empiricist, logicist and positivist views.
knockingatthegate | 11 hours ago
Of course one sets the “metaphysical” apart from the measurable, if one is doing science. It’s rather hard to investigate or understand a phenomenon if it’s not sufficiently well-defined or sufficiently endurant to permit definition. It’s almost as if one has moved beyond science to speculation…