Evidently someone went to the Service Meeting last week and heard the the item on evolution from the 'Reasoning' book!
George
scientific method and truth ...
by soft+gentle 66 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
cofty
I believe scientific method helps create useful conceptualisations of the world rather than makes discoveries concerning the truth about the world as such. -FBS
Science is a method for discovering actual facts about the real world. The earth actually revolves around the sun its not just a conception.
-
bohm
SBF: I believe scientific method helps create useful conceptualisations of the world rather than makes discoveries concerning the truth about the world as such.
I nominate this to a deepity award.
- It has a direct interpretation which is trivially true: All ideas we can have about the world are fundamentally just concepts and how concepts relate. For instance we can say if we put one apple in a bowl and another apple in a bowl there are two apples in the bowl, but "one", "two", "bowl" or "apple" are just concepts; our mental representation of real apples, real bowls and so on.
- On the other hand it is profound and false: How on earth do we think about "the truth about the world as such" without actually invoking concepts? How do we get about even talking about truth (ie. theories of truth) without invoking concepts?
I wish the people who point out the many real flaws of the scientific method (such as all the things it has been unable to help us answer, all the times it has been wrong, how expensive and problematic it is to apply and so on) would spend a little time describing which alternative non-emperical methods there are to figure out how the world works; surely such a breakthrough would have many profound application to cosmology, medicine, engineering...
[updated]
-
slimboyfat
Scientific understanding of the world is subject to paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated. One conceptual model is superseded by another that is incompatible with the former. Einsteinian physics superseded Newton, and the latest accounts of evolution significantly revise its mechanism as understood in the nineteenth century. There is little reason to believe that we are at the end of this process. If science did not give an entirely accurate account of reality at any time in the past, why should we suppose that it does so now? Therefore instead of viewing science as a quest for truth, a quest that must ultimately fail, it is better understood as a process for constructing useful ways of understanding the world. In that way we need only hold on to each picture of reality as long as it is useful and harbour no delusions about scientific theories providing a clear picture of reality unclouded by the slippage of human language.
-
bohm
SBF: I still dont understand what exactly an actual "discovery about the truth of the world" would be different than established knowledge about the world.
Lets take for instance the example of the two apples and the bowl. A stone-age man (and many animals!) is able to understand that one apple and one apple equal two apples, and despite Thomas Kuhn, I think the majority of scientists today would agree that is still what actually happends: if you put one apple after another in a bowl you actually end up with two apples in the bowl. Personally I cannot think of a better way of describing the situation, only add a lot of irellevant details.
Ofcourse "one", "two" and so on are all concepts.. but is it really that meaningfull to argue these are not actually the truth of the situation? In that case, how do we establish that is the case? how would we understand?
-
slimboyfat
I don't know if a bowl is a concept early man would understand. An apple is a part of a tree, as we understand it. We decide to cut the fruit from the branch (or wait for it to fall) and call that part an apple. This is entirely arbitrary and a convention of current human language. Why not cut off the whole branch and call it an apple-branch and put it in a larger "bowl"? An animal that eats both fruit and branches together might think an apple-branch is a much more sensible unit than simply an apple on its own. Or why not just cut off the skin and put it in a bowl and leave the rest of the apple on the tree? An animal that only eats the skin might call it apple-skin, and have no use for a word that distinguishes an apple from the rest of the tree but fails to distinguish the edible skin from the rest of the tree. What if early man did have a "bowl", but the "apple" that he put in it was not comparable to any modern apple? What if it was closer genetically to a modern pear? Is that still an apple in a bowl? Or is it a pear in a bowl or neither or both?
-
bohm
SBF: " Or why not just cut off the skin and put it in a bowl and leave the rest of the apple on the tree?"
Lets suppose tribes in the stone age often did that. How exactly does that become an argument? Surely, even if the stone-age man for some reason couldnt figure out which part of an apple to eat and therefore didnt have an understanding of what an apple is (and since this seem to be something a chimpanzee readily understand, you really think this is beyond him?), he would still arrive at the conclusion that one apple peel and one apple peel equal two apple peels, or what?
Again, I think the original statement is either trivially true (concepts are not real objects) or not very accurate since we cannot understand or communicate truths about the world without invoking concepts.
-
slimboyfat
What if it was not a human naming the apple-skin? What if it was an animal that could eat only the skin of the apple. To them the relevant unit is the apple-skin. They would have little use for a concept that distinguishes the apple-fruit from the rest of the apple-tree but not the apple-skin itself. And if they collect the skin from a number of apples and put it in a bowl then how many "apples" do we have in the bowl? Do you begin to see how our description of the world is utterly contingent upon the social world we inhabit, even when talking about a concept as apparently simple and straightforward as an apple.
Suppose we are talking about early humans who eat fruits resembling modern apples. They have no use for a modern classification system that divides fruit according genetic or even morphological taxonomy. A more useful categorisation to them may have been colour, so that they put red apples and red peaches together in one "bowl" and yellow apples in different "bowl" and green apples in yet another "bowl". You may inform them that their red fruit "bowl" contains different fruit and that their other coloured collections conceptually belong together, but why is your categorisation of fruit any better or more truthful than theirs? In truth it is not, it is simply a result of different language networks arising from different social situations.
To make matters even more complicated, as I mentioned earlier, early man may not have encountered a fruit that strictly corresponds with modern apples and the concept of putting them in a bowl would surely have baffled him.
-
cofty
SBF - you seem to be making a point about linguistics. It doesn't change anything about the ability of the scientific method's to uncover facts about reality. How we choose to organise those facts is another subject
-
bohm
SBF: Okay, suppose i accept the ancient world was likely populated with tribes for whom statements such as "one fruit plus one fruit is two fruits" made little sence.
I still dont understand the last bit. What are actual truths about the world, exactly? How is it any different than the triviality that concepts of real objects are not real objects? And if so, this distinction is certainly true independent of how we arrived at the concept (science, etc.).